Drinking the Ink from My Pen
by jezebelz
Summary: "It's much worse than any torture I ever thought up for him. I must be losing my edge."  Complete.
1. Chapter 1

"You're a bitch," Rebekah says. It's the first thing out of her mouth when I yank the dagger out of her back and her skin goes from nightmare green to her usual stuck-up movie-star pale. She frowns down at the red satin she made me choose. "And you ruined my dress."

I still hold the dagger, which is probably why Rebekah hasn't killed me yet. It is oddly weighted, heavier than something of its size should be. "He's not dead," I tell her. "Klaus."

Rebekah stills. "And my father?"

I shake my head. She still isn't looking at me, but she seems to register the movement. "Klaus killed him."

Rebekah doesn't say anything for a long time. "Good," she says, finally. She touches her fingers to her mother's necklace. "Good."

There are lots of things I could ask her, starting with _What do you mean, good? _and including _If you kill me now, can you try not to make it hurt too much?_ but what I do ask is something almost conversational. Almost. "What are you going to do?"

"Well, I'm not saying here, am I?" Rebekah shakes herself, turns to her mirror. She stares at her glittering lips as she speaks. Her lip gloss remains shiny even after an evening as a corpse and I stop myself from asking her what brand it is. "Forgive me if I find your idea of hospitality a bit cloying."

It's difficult, stabbing someone in the back. Physically difficult. There are bones there, muscles. Damon showed me the place but I still had to push hard to get the dagger through, to make sure it pierced her heart.

It's an intimate act. Killing someone. "Look, Rebekah," I begin, but then Damon is in the doorway and I don't know what I'd say next, anyway.

Damon doesn't even spare her a glance. "Barbie Klaus. Out," he says.

Rebekah walks by him, slowly, slowly. "Aren't you just the cat who got the bird. Tell me, Elena," she says, barely looking over her shoulder, "did he pretend to save Stefan the whole time, or just when you were around to witness it?"

Like that, they're at each other's throats. "I'll _end_ you," Damon grits. It would have been slightly more threatening if his voice had been louder than a wheeze.

The dagger clatters to the floor as I stutter forward. Because I'm going to, what? Pry her undead fingers from his windpipe?

Rebekah doesn't even sound strained. "I'd say I'd like to see you try," she lilts, "but I find mediocrity so tedious, don't you?"

She releases him, and Damon takes a stumbling step backward. He's off-balance. Damon is _never_ off-balance. I'm reaching for him before I mean to reach for him and he waves me off, impatient. "Get out," he manages, glaring at Rebekah.

She smirks, keeping her gaze on Damon as she walks across the room - toward me, the opposite direction from the door - and dips down to pick up the dagger. The dagger I had been holding; my insurance policy. "I'll just take this," she says. "I would hate for it to fall into the wrong hands."

She looks at me then, and it's different from the way she'd met my eyes in the mirror the day before. Then, I'd been able to see the girl she'd been, once upon a time. Now all I can see is how very much older than me she really is. Older, and capable of inifinitely more destruction.

I keep my gaze steady but I know she can see the pulse in my neck, fluttering like crazy.

When she's sure I've gotten the message, Rebekah sashays out, all hips and heels. I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. It sounds more like a sob. I can still feel the indentation of the dagger's hilt in my palms.

I'm aware of Damon by degrees, the way a room can go from chilly to sweltering: the extremes are the only thing you notice. First he's there and then he's _there_, his eyes on my face, his hands. "Breathe," he says, and that's how I know I've dropped to my knees.

"The dagger, Damon," I hear myself saying. "She has the dagger."

"She also has a wicked case of post-stabbing death breath," he says. "You win some, you lose some."

"We have _nothing_ now. She could be waiting outside. She could be anywhere."

"You're still under Klaus' protection," Damon tells me. He's touching my hair and I want to clutch at his wrists, hold him still because the motion of his hands reminds me how ephemeral I am to him. How temporary. "Even if she's going after him, which I don't think even she'd be stupid enough to do, she wouldn't bother with you."

"I stabbed her, Damon. Worse than that, I pretended to be her friend and _then_ I stabbed her."

"Still," he says. "She's not going to kill you."

His hands settle on my shoulders and I stop myself from moving forward. It would be simple, to insert myself into his arms. Simple, and disingenuous. The comfort I crave isn't something I can just take. "There are plenty of things she could do to me that wouldn't involve killing me. Plenty of people she could hurt. My brother. Bonnie." _You_, I don't say, because even borderline hysterical I recognize that there are lines.

"She won't come back," Damon says.

I search his face, because it must be written there if he's lying. "How do you know?"

"Because you have nothing she wants anymore," he says, and it's not me he's talking about, it's the fact that Stefan made a choice and I am not it. _She could have him_, he doesn't say, and I don't say _Yeah, I know_. Maybe she's what Stefan wants now. I don't know.

But I don't know anything about what Rebekah wants either, do I? She was loved, and she was betrayed. Or, she loved, and she loved a lie. She woke up and the world was different from what she'd always believed it to be, hard and cold and _wrong_, and the one person she'd clung to turned out to be the one who had hurt her in the first place.

I am the one who dropped the dagger. Just like I am the one who let Stefan go, the one who couldn't hold her breath and close her eyes long enough for the fairy tale to reassert itself. And I will never be able to pay for it, not the way I should.

I shrug out of Damon's grasp and stumble down the hall, out the front door and into the air that smells like rain, even though the sky is clear and blue. A storm is coming, I think.

When Caroline sends me a text the next morning asking why the evil blood slut's still angling to be head cheerleader, I'm not even surprised. Not really.


	2. Chapter 2

I have been an idealist. I have sung along with the songs that use the word _love_ without irony. I have been the sort of girl who begins journal entries with _Dear Diary_.

When I write now it's in frenzied bursts. _Never is only a long time when you come with an expiration date. Damon said that, the expiration thing. I shoved him and told him to go to hell but he was right, just like he was right when he said Stefan wouldn't be back, wouldn't be done. Not in my lifetime. Because that's what I have, a lifetime. He has all the time in the world._

Damon has all the time in the world, too, but apparently he intends to spend as much of it as possible being a pain in my ass.

"Alaric will be keeping an eye out and I'll be there the second you text me. The second _anyone_ texts me. An alert from my wireless carrier about going over my minutes may result in carnage, just fyi." He looks at me, suddenly serious. "If she so much as looks crosswise at you I will tear her eyes out."

"No, you won't."

"You can't say that definitively."

"Yes, I can. And, Damon, I'm not a fragile little flower. I faced her down once. I can do it again." I'm not sure of any such thing but I do know that being trailed at _school_ by one or more well-meaning chaperones is absolutely the last thing I need in my life right now. "I'll be fine. Seriously."

"I'll meet you after school. _Right_ after school. If you're not home fifteen minutes after the last bell rings I will start killing things."

"No, you won't."

"No, I won't. Probably." He does the crazy-eyes thing he thinks makes him look dangerous. Maybe it does. Maybe I don't know what dangerous looks like anymore.

But I'm pretty sure I do know danger when I see it, because when I walk into class and see Rebekah with her head next to another girl's, both of them scribbling animatedly into the same notebook, my blood runs cold. Because the girl Rebekah is sitting next to is Bonnie.

They're so close to each other that I can see Rebekah's platinum hair intertwining with Bonnie's dark brown curls. I glance at the notebook, but all I can see are symbols that don't make sense. Or maybe they do make sense, but not to me. Kind of like this whole scenario.

They both look up when I sit down. Rebekah dimples in a way that can only be described as pure evil. "Elena," she says, her voice practically dripping with happiness. "I was just talking about you."

"Really," I say. "I thought you'd be a million miles away by now."

"It's lucky for me she isn't," Bonnie says. "Rebekah told me -"

But I don't get to find out what Rebekah told Bonnie because Mrs. Travers comes into the room, shouting about Shakespeare. "'_I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father_,'" she says. "What does it mean, people?"

Rebekah's hand shoots up. "Portia's options for suitors are still dictated by what her father wanted for her," she says.

"Right. Why is that a problem for her?" Mrs. Travers asks.

"She isn't allowed the choice," Rebekah replies. "Portia is a romantic. She doesn't want love to be based on chance."

Rebekah's eyes flit to mine for the merest second.

"But it is based on chance," I say, and then everyone's looking at me. "Nothing is up to her. All Portia can do is complain about what she doesn't want. In the end, it's still her father who makes the final decision."

"Ah, but that isn't true at all, is it?" Rebekah says to me, her eyes glittering. "'_So may the outward shows be least themselves. The world is still deceived with ornament_.'"

"The only reason Bassanio says that is after her household basically spoils him for the right choice," I say.

"But it's still a choice," Rebekah says, a grin teasing her face.

"It's a choice for him, not for her."

"A choice he makes based on, what was it you said? Spoilers from her household? I don't imagine you think they too were working against her."

"They're her household. Of course they're going to take her side."

"You're admitting she has a side," Rebekah says.

"Everyone has a side," I say.

Mrs. Travers claps her hands together. "Moving on, people. Who can tell me what Nerissa means when she says..."

As everyone else turns to face the front, Rebekah keeps her eyes on me. I'm so busy trying to ignore her that I don't notice for a moment that she's trying to pass something to me.

A note. A thousand year old Original vampire is passing me a note in class.

I snatch the paper out of her hands and unfold it. _You understand nothing_, it says.

Oh, I understand nothing, do I? Face burning, I take up my pen. _You can't have him_, I write. _He didn't just leave me. He left everyone. Including you_.

I start to pass the note back but Rebekah shakes her head. The barest hint of a smile touches her lips. She moves them soundlessly: "It isn't Stefan I want."

I stare at her, but Rebekah's facing front again, her hand in the air to answer another question.

From her other side, Bonnie gives me a little grin, but when I shake my head at her, confused, she looks away. By the time the bell rings and I get up to leave for my next class the two of them are gone.

Standing in front of my locker, I have to stop myself before I actually hit Send on a text asking Damon to come wreak some havoc. It's not so much the havoc that stands in my way - a little havoc sounds like a nice distraction right now - but I remember the way his voice sounded while Rebekah's hand was wrapped around his throat. I backspace carefully. _She's up to something but hasn't made a move_, I type instead. _And stay out of my underwear drawer_.

A second later, my phone pings. _Poke her with something pointy and wooden for me_, he says. _And your underwear's boring. Except for the lacy thing_.

I scowl and type in a reply. _Which lacy thing? The red, or the black?_

He doesn't text anything back. I think it's deeply appropriate for me to feel that this was a victory. I mean, he was _already_ rooting through my underthings.

"What," a voice says from over my left shoulder, "is going on?"

I spin around, but it's just Caroline. I say _just_, but her death glare suggests I might want to keep that particular adverb to myself for the time being. "You'll have to be more specific," I tell her.

"Bonnie. Death bitch. Together, with the - why?" It's never a good sign when Caroline loses nouns.

"That's what I'm trying to find out," I tell her.

She arches an eyebrow. "By texting Damon about your underwear?"

Caroline must have been behind me for longer than I realized. My face goes very, very red. "That's not - there's context. It makes more sense in it."

"Whatever. So Bonnie's all vamp-positive now? And decides to go buddy-buddy with _Rebekah_?" Caroline's eyes are huge and full of tears, brought on by either rage or betrayal or possibly blood lust. "We still hate Rebekah, don't we?"

I don't know how to answer that. I mean, obviously, yes. Of course we hate her. Except. "Care, it's going to be okay. I'll figure it out."

"It's not. It's not going to be okay. Bonnie's decided to be bff with the one girl who could actually steal my spot as head cheerleader as well as massacre the entire school, Tyler won't even _talk_ to me even though I'm totally the wronged party and also being the bigger person by trying to talk to him at all, and you're so busy with _Damon_ that you don't even notice that I am_ completely falling apart right now_."

"Caroline," I say, but she just shakes her head and flounces off.

I start to go after her, but Alaric picks that moment to check on me. "How's it going?" he asks.

"It's fine," I say.

"Is she -"

"I don't know."

"All right. Well, if you need -"

"I will."

Alaric looks at me sadly for a moment. "I wish I could protect you," he says in a quiet voice, and my heart breaks sharply. But just for that moment.

"I don't need protecting," I tell him, and then I hear an explosion. An explosion, and screams.


	3. Chapter 3

The hall is choked with people running for the doors. I take off after Alaric in the opposite direction, winding our way through the panicked masses. I wonder if there was a time when it occurred to me to do anything differently.

Out of nowhere arms grab me around the waist and then I'm being yanked through a door, into a dark room.

"What are you doing? Let go of me," I shout as the door clicks shut.

I'm not at all surprised when he turns the light on, because who else has made it his duty to keep me from doing anything useful at all?

"There's been an _explosion_," Damon says, looking at me like I'm the crazy one. "You were running _toward_ it."

"Of course I was! Someone could be hurt!"

"Yes. _You_."

I squirm, and he sighs theatrically before releasing me from his arms. "I have to see what happened," I say, yanking on the door handle.

"Don't bother," Damon says. "Locked."

I whirl around, my face hot with fury. "You _locked_ me in a _supply __closet_."

"No," he says calmly, perching on the edge of a mop bucket. "I locked _us_ in a supply closet. And it's fine. As soon as Ric sends the text with the all-clear I'll deposit you back in the hall just like nothing happened."

"This is what passes for a brilliant strategy with you? Abduction, with promises of release? What if the rest of the school blows up, Damon? I will be dead, and you will be responsible!"

"And I will feel very, very bad about it," Damon says, and that's how I know he's already figured out what had caused the explosion. "Besides, you'll have me to keep you company during your last few precious moments of life. Anything you'd like to say? I seem to remember deathbed confessions being your specialty."

"No, that's you," I say, and Damon favors me with an icy glare. I fling myself at the door, sliding to the ground and glaring right back up at him. "This sucks. You're treating me like a porcelain doll and it sucks."

"Come on, Elena. We never just hang out anymore now that -" Damon cuts himself off mid eyebrow-waggle. "Maybe I just wanted to spend some quality time with my favorite damsel in distress."

"I'm not a damsel, Damon. I'm just distressed." I don't miss the fact that he stops short of mentioning Stefan's name. I push my hair out of my face. "So if we're not in danger of death by explosion, why are we in here? What else should I be worrying about?"

He looks irritated by the question, and he won't meet my eye. Neither thing is particularly reassuring. "Have I ever mentioned that you tend to jump to conclusions?"

"Have I ever mentioned that your poker face sucks?"

"My poker face is excellent. I can't help it that you're just annoyingly persistent." He smirks at me. "Can't you just enjoy the moment?"

"It smells like pine cleaner in here. And no."

"Fine." He looks as though he's going to say something else, something that tastes bad in his mouth, but then his cell phone makes a noise like a strangled duck. Damon glances down and frowns at it, managing to look relieved and annoyed all at once. "Ric says it's okay. Guess you missed your chance for twenty questions."

"Wait," I say, scrambling to my feet. "How about one question? What else -"

"Fine, but you have to answer one for me first," Damon says. He looks at me so intensely that I shut my mouth with a snap.

All of the questions he might ask run through my head in rapid succession. _Do __you __ever __think __about __me. __Is __there __something __between __us. __What __did __you __mean __when __you __said __we__'__d __let __him __go. __Do __you __love __me._

But what he says is, "You don't actually own anything black and lacy, do you?"

"No," I answer, almost laughing with relief. Damon pops the lock on the door - the janitor will have to get that fixed, there's no way it's even going to shut right now - and lets us out into the hall. "Now what about my question?"

He's already gone, of course.

The halls are deserted. The chaos that had surrounded me before Damon decided I'd be better off in a supply closet has disappeared, leaving behind the faint scent of sulphur and the distinct feeling that I'm missing something. The silence makes my ears ring. I poke my head into the history classroom but Alaric is nowhere to be found.

Outside it's too bright and I shade my eyes with my hand.

The fire trucks are just rolling up, sirens on, even though I didn't smell any smoke. Why didn't I smell any smoke? I'm annoyed all over again at Damon and his disappearing act. What had that explosion been?

"Elena! Over here!" Caroline, apparently over her snit, waves from the picnic tables. I wave back, but she's quickly sidetracked by the rest of the pep squad. Matt and Tyler are standing under the trees. I do a quick scan for Bonnie but I don't see her.

Then arms are around me, too tight and shaking. "Oh my god, Elena," Jeremy is saying. "Oh my god."

"Jer, I'm fine," I say, laughing a little, but he only pulls back enough to grab my shoulders and give me a shake. He's not smiling.

"What were you doing?" he asks. His voice is rough, and I'm suddenly shocked to see that his warm brown eyes are full of tears. "You can't do that to me, Elena. You're all I've got."

"What are you talking about?" I ask, but gently.

"What were you doing in there?" my brother rasps. "How did you get out?"

"Jeremy, hey." I grab his wrists. "I'm fine. I was nowhere near the explosion."

He stares at me. "Elena, I _saw_ you. You walked right into the gym, and I was about to go after you to find out what you were doing when -" He takes a shuddering breath. "I saw you, Elena."

A strange, cold feeling seeps over me. "It wasn't me, Jeremy."


	4. Chapter 4

At the Grill I keep my phone on the table in front of me, watching as Bonnie fails to answer any of my texts. It's almost as much fun as watching Damon refuse to answer any of my texts, but at least I'm relatively sure Damon isn't consorting with evil ancient vampires who crave my destruction.

Relatively sure.

"Earth to Elena," Matt says, waving his hand in front of my face. "You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?"

"Sorry," I say, shaking myself. "I guess the explosion rattled me more than I thought it did."

"Yeah, you and Rebekah both."

I look at him, startled. "What do you mean, Rebekah? What did she have to do with it?"

"She didn't have anything to do with it, Elena," Matt says. "God, why do you guys hate on her so much? Bekah's not bad."

_Bekah?_ "No, I just meant, why was she rattled? Especially?"

He shrugs. "When the gym blew, me and her and Bonnie were all standing by the water fountain and Rebekah, like, almost passed out. I think she would have hit the floor if Bonnie hadn't been holding on to her arm."

I stare at him. Rebekah is a thousand year old vampire. I doubt an exploding high school gymnasium would give her a sudden case of the vapors.

A witch, though. A witch was a different story entirely.

As though she senses that I'm thinking about her, Bonnie picks that moment to come into the Grill, arm in arm with everyone's favorite blonde bloodsucker.

Matt bounces to his feet as they approach our table. "Bonnie," he says, his face splitting into a grin.

"Hey, Matt." Bonnie slides into the seat next to him, leaving Rebekah to perch gracefully in the chair next to mine.

Rebekah is wearing a delicate, lacy top and has her hair pulled back from her face, making her look angelic and not at all homicidal. I steel myself so that I won't shrink back from her, but she notices, of course. Her smile gets wider, like she can smell my fear.

"It's lovely to see you, Elena," Rebekah says. "I was just thinking we don't spend nearly enough time together."

"That's because you hate me," I say, smiling sweetly at her. _Can_ vampires actually smell fear, like guard dogs? I picture Rebekah as a Doberman, snarling at me from behind a fence. It does little to calm the pounding of my heart.

"She doesn't hate you," Bonnie says. "You just haven't given her a chance."

I almost laugh. "And obviously you're the expert on giving vampires the benefit of the doubt. Oh wait, except that you never do."

"You're not being fair," Bonnie says with a smile. "I'd be happy to explain of of this to you if you would just agree to have an open mind."

"Bonnie, you're not even returning my texts. What's the matter, is your new bff screening your calls?"

"Come on, Elena," Matt says, but he's looking fondly at Bonnie. "We're all friends here."

"That's just it," I say. "We're not." I stand up.

"And where are you going?" Rebekah asks coolly, her face impassive.

"Someplace that's not here," I tell her. "I don't know you guys are up to, but I'm going to - oh my god."

My eyes stray to the other side of the table, where Matt and Bonnie are kissing each other.

_Matt. _And _Bonnie_. _Kissing_. _Each __other._

They notice me staring and break apart, wearing identical expressions of surprise. Which would be funny under different circumstances, or never.

I open my mouth, close it again. "What is going _on_ here?" I ask finally.

No one says anything for a minute. Then Matt's eyes flick to mine. "Sorry, Elena," he says quietly. His lips are slightly iridescent from Bonnie's lip gloss, "but I've kind of liked Bonnie for a while."

Okay. Not what I was expecting. I turn to Bonnie. "I guess you're over my brother, then," I say flatly.

She has the good grace to flush. "It's not like that, Elena. I just..." she shrugs prettily. "I just wanted to kiss Matt. So I did."

I stare at them for a minute. Bonnie and Matt keep glancing at each other and smiling; Rebekah is examining her nails. "Okay. Well, I want to leave. So."

I half-expect one of them to follow me, but when I get out to the street and take breath after breath of the cool early evening air, I'm alone.

Bonnie and Matt have known each other forever. Longer than forever. Why would they suddenly go all kissyface now?

I fumble my phone out of my pocket. _Where __are __you? _I text Damon.

I'm beyond relieved when there's a new message ping. _Recon_, he replies. _Trying __to __see __if __there__'__s __anything __to __your __Katherine __theory_.

_And?_ I type, but that's apparently all I'm going to get out of him tonight. He's not ignoring me, though, and that's something.

Not that I care whether Damon's ignoring me. Not that I'm picturing him talking to Katherine. Not that it would bother me.

"Sexting again?" Caroline asks. She's wearing a grin that suggests the afternoon has involved many drinks courtesy a compelled bartender. Or maybe a flask, courtesy a non-compelled boy-toy. "You know guys like it better when they have to work for it a little."

I roll my eyes. "Do you need a ride home?" I ask.

"No thanks," Caroline says breezily. "I've got it covered."

"Hey, Care," Tyler calls from the driver's side of his car as he pulls up to the curb. He looks disheveled, but not especially upset. "Let's get out of here. Oh, hey, Elena."

I look at him and raise an eyebrow at her.

"What?" she says. "We're talking things through."

"Right," I say, but she's already in the car. "Good luck with that."


	5. Chapter 5

Surfacing from a dream is always disorienting. There's a moment of free-fall, when you're not sure which is real; when your body is still convinced you're running or flying or driving a car on a winding mountain road with no brakes and a broken gas pedal.

Sometimes you don't want to wake up. Sometimes it's better, whatever reality your mind unspools for you.

And sometimes you know within a second of opening your eyes that nothing you just experienced was real. This dream was one of those.

I knew it was a dream because Damon was about to kiss me, and I was about to let him.

He had an uncharacteristically serious look on his face. Maybe not even serious; maybe just guileless, and Damon without guile - well. It was worse than catching him naked.

He leaned to kiss me on the cheek. A totally appropriate, totally non-hot kiss on the cheek. Sort of. Except that when his lips brushed my skin it wasn't appropriate at all, the way I arched toward him like a magnet.

Our eyes met, which was probably a really bad idea. It's hard enough looking Damon in the eye, even when I'm not all stirred-up and confused by his lips. He's always so...raw, when he looks at me.

But then he wasn't looking at my eyes. He was looking at my mouth, and that sent my pulse fluttering faster than anything. Someone else - someone like Stefan - might have walked away, propriety firmly in place, my virtue protected. That would have been the right thing to do.

Damon angled forward again. I knew he was giving me every opportunity to pull away, to laugh or shake my head and let him pretend that he hadn't been doing _anything_, what, was I crazy? Of course he wouldn't try to kiss me. Of course.

He moved so slowly I could measure the time by my breaths.

One: his body was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off of it, a smell of smoke and leather and his skin.

Two: I felt myself moving almost imperceptibly closer to him, not encouraging, but not discouraging either.

Three: I lifted my chin just the tiniest bit and he closed the distance between us, pressing a single kiss against my mouth. It was almost sweet, the way I could feel him shaking.

Then his lips parted and so did mine and there was nothing _sweet_ about it.

I wake up clutching the sheets in my hands the way I'd clutched his collar, my breath coming in ragged gasps. My skin feels like it's on fire and I'm shaking so hard my teeth chatter.

Which is stupid, because it was just a _dream_. Not even a shocking dream; I've had more explicit fantasies about Ryan Gosling during homeroom and those never left me jittering like a seizure victim.

I press my hands to my face, trying to get my breathing under control. It's loud in the darkness, harsh.

"What," Damon says. One second I'm alone and the next he's denting the mattress next to me, his eyes searching my face.

I pull back, the memory of his mouth - his _tongue_ - way too vivid.

He turns me to face him and his hands on my shoulders almost undo me. "What _is __it_, Elena?" he asks again. "Did something happen? Was Rebekah here?"

Rebekah. Right. The vampire I'm actually afraid of. "Don't you know already?" I snap. My entire body wants to wrap itself around him like a barnacle. "Haven't you been lurking outside my window all this time?"

Damon scowls at me. "I prefer to think of it as keeping watch. And yes, I have. But I might have missed something."

"How?" I ask. I could talk about his stalker tendencies all night, as long as it distracts him from my state of obvious discomposure. "You never miss anything, Damon."

Seeming reassured that I'm not in immediate danger, he lets go of my shoulders and leans back, resting his head on the wall. "Yeah. Well. I obviously missed whatever happened in here." He glances over at me, doing a thing with his eyebrows that makes me blush and glare at him and pull the sheets more tightly around myself. "If I didn't know better, I'd think I should be jealous."

"I had - a nightmare," I tell him, after it becomes clear I'll have to say _something_. I sound somewhat breathier than I mean to.

"Whatever you say," Damon replies with a grin, and I realize he must still be able to hear the rhythm of my heart, the way it speeds and slows according to the sound of his voice. "Seriously. You're okay, though."

"Yes," I say. I realize I still have the sheets fisted in my hands and I smooth them over my thighs. "I'm fine."

He reaches toward me and for one heart-stopping moment I think he's just going to take me in his arms. More shockingly, no matter how awful it is (Stefan's _brother_, the man who _broke __my __brother__'__s __neck_) I realize I would let him.

I am not like this. I am not a girl who is so desperate for affection that she just takes it where she can get it. I'm attracted to him, maybe. Obviously. This may not have been the first time I've dreamed about kissing him, woken up all tangled up with his name on my tongue and my hands clenched between my legs. I try not to think about it, because thinking about it would mean thinking about _why_ and that just isn't a road I want to go down.

I've always been able to shake it off. I can't shake it off tonight, and that feels...wrong, somehow.

Rather than gathering me up and busting some sort of seduction move, Damon reaches past me and snaps off the light. "It's late," he says, his breath ghosting over my ear. His hand doesn't quite make it all the way back to the other side of the bed; it comes to rest just at the curve of my hip. "Get some rest. I'll stay here and keep an eye on you."

Which is utterly unworkable, for so many reasons. "Get out, Damon," I say.

He doesn't move. "Why?"

_Because I can't trust myself right now. Because I will do something I will regret._

_Because __I __can__'__t __stop __thinking __about __you._ "You need to not be here," I say. My voice is hoarse, like I've been screaming. Like my throat is raw from holding back all the things I want to say to him. I amend the statement, to get rid of any ambiguity. "I don't want you here."

"Really, Elena?" Damon says. I can feel his breath again, warm on the side of my neck. "Where do you want me?"

And that's it. That's just it. All of my fury and frustration and goddamned sexual tension come spilling out in one short, bitter burst. "Is this how you think it's going to happen, Damon? That I'm so miserable about Stefan that you can just pick up where he left off? I'm not like that. I've never been like that." I swallow. It makes an audible click. "I thought you knew me better."

Damon is silent for a moment. "I was joking," he says, finally.

"No, you weren't. You're never joking."

I expect him to stalk out of the room, maybe with a comment about how I used to be more fun. I was more fun, once. Now I'm just pathetic.

But he doesn't leave. "I know you're not like that," he says, his voice reed-thin in the darkness. Seriously. He's going to take this seriously.

"Damon. _Please._" I need him to go. My mortification is waiting on the sidelines, impatient for the moment when I'm really alone so that I can let the blood rush to my face, wishing I could throw up or control-alt-delete or possibly die.

"But you have to understand something, Elena," he goes on, as though I haven't spoken. "I _am_ like that. I'm not Stefan. I will not do the right thing just because I can. If I thought -" his hand tightens compulsively on my hip and it takes every ounce of self-control I have to not just roll over and grab him. "-if I thought you and I had a chance, I would be all over it. Do you understand me? Not because it's right. Not because it's what I _should_ do. Because I want it."

It's his voice that breaks me. He doesn't sound righteous or angry or passionate or anything like that. He sounds miserable. Like he's admitting something shameful.

And suddenly I remember the look on his face in my dream. It had the same undertone as his voice does now; a faint, blink-and-you'll-miss-it dash of self-loathing. I know, because I feel the same thing.

"Please just go," I say again, and this time he does.


	6. Chapter 6

If today was a school day, I could snooze my alarm one too many times and then get up in a rush, too frantic to think about the night before. If it was a school day I'd be hurrying to class right now, books clutched to my chest, the cacophony of the day acting as a perfect distraction.

Today is not a school day. "Elena, seriously. It's eight in the morning on a Saturday," Alaric croaks blearily from the direction of the couch. "Is cooking absolutely necessary?"

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," I tell him, forcing myself to sound cheerful. "You wouldn't mind so much if you weren't hung over."

"I am not hung over," he says. "But, just - keep the banging to a minimum."

I relent and bring him a cup of coffee and some aspirin, prompting Alaric to suggest that my lineage is all angels and holy people. He looks terrible and wonderful all at the same time, and I wonder when exactly I started loving him.

I shouldn't. It's not safe for me to love people. For them.

"Do you want two pancakes or three?" I call from the kitchen.

"Three," Jeremy says, clomping down the stairs. "Is there bacon? Tell me there's bacon."

"No bacon, but there is veggie sausage."

"Veggie sausage is not a food," Alaric declares. He sounds somewhat more alive than he did a moment ago. Coffee does a hangover good.

"I'll take a foodless sausage," Jeremy says. "What was Damon doing here last night?"

I freeze for what feels like minutes but what may only be seconds. "He was keeping an eye on me," I say slowly. "On us. He was making sure we're safe."

"I don't know, Elena, sounded more like he was keeping your bed warm."

"Watch it," Alaric says, shuffling into the kitchen. "Your sister's business is her business." He looks at me. "What _was_ Damon doing here last night?"

I glare at Jeremy, who is grinning in between bites of pancake. "We were _talking_. All right? We weren't even talking loudly, which - how would you know what he was doing and how it related to my bed?"

"So you admit it," Jeremy says, and his grin gets bigger.

"I admit that you're a jerk," I mutter.

"Relax, Elena, I get it. Stefan's gone and you need a little vamp loving. No one here is going to judge you for that."

My mouth falls open.

Alaric reaches across the table and smacks Jeremy in the head. "What's wrong with you?" he asks, his voice harsh.

Jeremy's grin falters. "I don't - I don't know." His eyes go from me to Alaric and back again. "Sorry, Elena."

He pushes back from the table, his breakfast half-finished, and is out the door before I can do more than call his name.

Alaric and I stare at each other in stunned silence. "What was that about?" he asks quietly.

"Jeremy never talks to me like that," I say. My lips feel numb. _Stefan__'__s __gone __and __you __need __a __little __vamp __loving_. "He'd never even think something like that."

"Well, maybe he'd think it," Ric says, "but he'd never say it out loud. Your brother's usually a nice kid."

I feel my eyes prick with tears and turn away from him quickly, piling the dishes in the sink. I need to be doing something with my hands right now. I feel like I'm unspooling and it's only by force of will that I'm keeping myself together.

The sound of Damon's voice in my head is the worst. _You __have __to __understand __something, __Elena._ Doesn't he think I understand enough already? Does he think it's easy for me, knowing how simple it would be to destroy the person I thought I was when I was with Stefan?

"Everything is a mess, Ric," I say. It's easier to talk to him when I can't see him. "That thing at school, with the gym, and Bonnie and Rebekah, and - where did you go yesterday, anyway? After the explosion? I looked for you but I didn't see you."

Alaric doesn't answer right away. When I look over at him, he's staring fixedly at the table. "I left," he says slowly. "I was going to keep an eye on you and your brother, but I left. I decided I really needed a drink." He raises his eyes to mine, slowly. "It was like I couldn't help myself."

Like Jeremy, casually suggesting that I'm hot for the undead. Like Bonnie and Matt making out at the table at the Grill.

Like me, having to physically stop myself from jumping Damon's bones last night.

I sink into the chair across from Alaric, my knees shaking so hard I don't think I could keep standing if I wanted to. "Something's happening," I say.

Alaric nods. "Something bad." Then suddenly he's pulling out his phone, dialing a number and cursing.

My eyes go wide. "Oh my god," I say. "Damon."


	7. Chapter 7

The drive to the boarding house takes longer than it ever has before, even though I'm going well over the speed limit. My hands are sweat-slick on the steering wheel and I clutch it hard enough that my knuckles go white.

He hasn't answered his phone. He won't respond to my texts, or Alaric's. Since when does he not respond to my texts?

This is my fault. I sent him away last night, hurt and angry, when there's some weird witch mojo going on and he could be _anywhere_, totally unable to control his impulses, at the mercy of whatever urge hits him first.

I'm out of the car as soon as I stop, hitting the ground running. "Damon!" I yell, pushing through the front door.

"Go away, Elena," Damon calls in a sing-song voice.

Okay. So whatever crazy, impulsive thing he's doing, at least he's doing it at home. That's something, right?

I walk in on a vamp orgy.

Okay, _orgy_ is maybe a strong word. No one is actually _doing __it_, but there are maybe half a dozen girls lounging on one piece of Salvatore furniture or another. Damon is sprawled on the sofa between them, a bunch of old books open in his lap. Which...doesn't seem very orgy-like, honestly, but maybe he has a fetish. He doesn't look up when I come in.

The girls are all young, pretty, bored-looking, twirling locks of their wavy dark-brown hair around their fingers...

Oh my god. Oh my _god_.

"Why do you have a room full of floozies who _look __like __me_?" I ask, and the only reason my voice breaks like that is because I've been sprinting. Obviously.

"They _resemble_ you," Damon says tiredly, "which is sort of the point. Also, I believe I said _go __away_."

He's baiting me. That means the last thing I should do is react. After all, he has no idea he's being influenced by an outside force. "Don't you think your emotional breakdowns are getting a bit predictable?" I say.

He does look up then, screwing up his eyes like I'm speaking in tongues. "No one is having a breakdown," he says. "I'm following up on some leads. Something Katherine said when I called her. It wasn't her at the school, by the way. She's apparently in Memphis."

"You called Katherine?" I say, my voice rising a little. I can't help it. "Is that why you couldn't reply to anyone's texts? Too busy playing catch-up with your ex?"

Again with the eye scrunch. "I didn't respond to your texts because I didn't have anything to report. Yet."

"Okay, how about now? Since I'm here, Damon, why don't you do some reporting?"

"Because I'm in the middle of conducting interviews with these lovely ladies here to find out if any of them have been compelled lately. Well," he muses, "by someone other than me, anyway."

The girls simper and giggle. I force myself to roll my eyes. "Some people have ice cream and chick flicks. You have blood-fueled sex romps." Using the words _sex__romps_ makes my throat close up in a funny way. "Do you need me to dial some sort of crisis intervention for you?"

"Is something wrong with you? Seriously, hormonally wrong?" He shuts one of the books, and something falls to the ground.

Katherine's picture. I'm surprised that, after all this time, it still gives me a little twinge of jealousy to see it. To see that they _kept_ it.

"You should talk to that chick," one of the girls who _resembles_ me says. "She looks, like, _exactly_ the same as the old-time lady."

Damon glares at me, and I stare right back. It's a mistake, as always. His eyes are like falling into a sheet of plate glass and they set my pulse hammering. I wish I could hide it from him, the way my body reacts when he's around.

"All right, girls," Damon says quietly. "Interview's over."

He doesn't look away from me as the candidates for Damon's Personal Katherine Blow-Up Doll - excuse me, _follow-ups_ - make disappointed noises and gather up jackets and purses. I glance at them as they go past. They don't really look all that much like me at all, not up close.

Finally, the door closes and they're gone. Damon rolls his eyes and spreads his arms across the back of the sofa. "Spill," he says.

"What?" I barely remember what I wanted to tell him. I'm pretty sure it's _not_ any variation of _take __me __now_.

"You obviously won't leave until you've said whatever it is you're hell-bent on saying. I thought we'd exhausted the sharing portion of our relationship last night, but you wouldn't be here otherwise. So spill."

Last night. I dredge up a remedial memory of why I came here. "You're under some sort of enchantment," I say.

Damon laughs. "Nice try. Go home, Elena."

"I'm serious, Damon."

"Of course you are." Suddenly he's right next to me, not touching me but decidedly _not_ outside my personal space. His body is like an exclamation point, sharp and hard and _oh __my __god __does __he __have __to __look __at __me __like __that_. "Wouldn't it be easier for you if you could explain this all away? Damon isn't _really_ in love with me, it's all some sort of trick. Would that make you happy, Elena? If you thought you could _fix_ me?"

My breath hitches. "Damon. Don't," I begin, but beyond that my mind is a blank. All I can think about is the smell of his skin, the heat radiating from him as his eyes bore into mine.

He frowns at my reaction, then starts pacing around me like a cat. "What are you _really_ doing here, Elena? Itch you can't scratch? Realize no _human_ boy is going to measure up after getting it from a vampire? You're right," he says, his voice dipping low. His eyes hold mine, dangerously dark. "I could do things to you that you can't even _imagine_."

It's so like what Jeremy accused me of over breakfast that I slap him without even meaning to. Damon catches my wrist easily, stopping my hand a millimeter from his face. He was expecting it. Of course.

"You came here spoiling for a fight," he says, staring hard at me, "but this isn't what you want. I know you miss him, but I'm not in the mood to be your punching bag. Go _home_, Elena."

I don't know how to explain the fact that I follow the motion of my hand and attack him with my lips, instead.


	8. Chapter 8

It's an _amazing _kiss.

Damon's lips open under mine instantly. There's no hesitation, not like in the dream last night; his tongue collides with mine and his free arm pulls me roughly against him. He's still got his fingers wrapped around my right wrist but his grip loosens enough for me to clasp my fingers into his. I arch myself against him, molding to the shape of his body.

Our teeth knock together and for a second he freezes, but I twist the fingers of my left hand into his hair and _pull_ and then he's making a sound in his throat and kissing me harder. The room spins around me like a tilt-a-whirl. Everywhere our skin is touching feels like it's on fire.

Then he pushes me away, breathing hard. "What the _hell_ was that," he asks roughly, staring at me like I've sprouted a second head.

For a second I can't speak. I literally cannot force air through my larynx.

"You're bleeding," is what I say when I finally manage to form words again.

He touches his fingers to his lips, glances down at them. His hand is shaking. "No," he says, his voice deceptively calm. "_You__'__re_ bleeding."

I touch my lower lip with the tip of my tongue. He's right; I must have split my lip when our teeth knocked together.

All of a sudden the room starts spinning again, but it's not the fun carnival-ride spin that happened when I was kissing him.

"Fuck. Elena," Damon says, and then he's catching me as my knees buckle.

Alaric picks that moment to slam into the room. "Don't touch her," he shouts, pointing his stake launcher at Damon's chest.

"This day just keeps getting better," Damon mutters. He sets me on the sofa and steps back, even though I know he's not afraid of Alaric.

It's almost like he's afraid of me. "Ric," I say, sitting up. "It's fine."

"Why is there blood on his mouth?" Alaric asks, not lowering the launcher.

"Standing right here," Damon says. "Ask Elena how she split her lip. Better yet, ask her why the hell she came here in the first place." He stalks over to the liquor table, pauses. "And while we're on the subject, what the hell are _you_ doing here?"

"You're under some sort of enchantment," Alaric says.

"Get a new line, Ric. That one's getting stale."

"I tried to tell you," I say.

"Was this before or after you shoved your tongue down my throat? Don't answer that," Damon says. He seems to have forgotten all about making himself a drink and is squinting at Alaric. "Exactly what sort of enchantment and how do you know about it?"

"We don't know, exactly," I say, but Damon holds up a hand.

"Not you," he says. "I'm not ready to talk to you yet. Ric."

Alaric makes a face. "We don't know, exactly," he says. "After the explosion at the school, people have been acting...strange. Impulsive. Like they can't stop themselves from doing whatever they want to do."

Damon's left eyebrow shoots up, but his face remains otherwise expressionless. "And you think I'm being affected by this?"

"Don't you think Girls Gone Wild: Doppelganger Edition suggests that you are?" I ask shrilly.

"Not you," he says again. His eyes are on Alaric's. "Who exactly was exhibiting this fascinating behavior?"

"Me. Jeremy."

"Bonnie and Matt," I chime in.

"Elena," Alaric continues.

"Obviously," Damon says, and his face does a funny thing, like a twitch.

"And you," I finish.

Damon finally turns his eyes to me. "Are you still bleeding, Elena?"

He knows I am. "I don't see what -"

"Oh," Alaric says, and he lowers the stake launcher. "Maybe it doesn't affect vampires."

"But it affected the witch," Damon says. He seems to remember that he was pouring himself a drink. "Bourbon, right?" he says to Alaric.

I watch the two of them downing liquor like I'm not even in the room, and it's all I can take. "What are you talking about? Damon's obviously affected by the enchantment. He was elbow-deep in bimbos when I came in, and then - and then -"

"Then you kissed me," Damon says calmly. He won't look at me. "Which, while delicious, should have tipped me off that there was some witchy nastiness in the air. After all, you're not like that. Are you, Elena?"

The blood. He'd tasted my blood and he hadn't vamped out. Hadn't tried to get more. Had, in fact, pushed me away.

Realization hits me like a slap. Damon isn't under any sort of enchantment.

And I've just made out with my ex-boyfriend's brother.

* * *

><p>"Caroline, pick up," I say. It's a silly thing to say to someone's voicemail, but I think I've established at this point that I'm not thinking rationally. "I really, really need to talk to you."<p>

I hang up. I turn the phone over and over in my hands. My fingers itch to dial Damon so instead I shove the phone in my pocket and head out the door. Enchantment 101: if you want to do something, you should probably do the opposite.

Outside, things seem deceptively normal. The street is quiet, the breeze is rustling the leaves, the sun is high in the sky. You'd have to be paying attention to notice the changes.

Two cars speed down my narrow street, racing, but instead of young punks at the wheel the drivers are middle-aged men in suits and the cars are an Audi and a Saturn wagon with a carpool sticker on the back. Someone is singing at the top of his lungs, off-key, from inside the house across the street, a medley of Journey and U2 songs all mashed up together.

I don't even want to think about the noises coming from the house on the corner. Mr. and Mrs. Klingerman are, like, seventy. _Gross_.

"It's a thing of beauty, isn't it?" Rebekah trills, falling into step beside me. She's wearing some very, very high heels and a skirt so short I'm almost embarrassed for her. Or I would be, if she didn't look so ridiculously cute in it. If I didn't already hate her, I would _hate_ her.

Next to her I feel tiny, like some sort of insect. "It's awful," I say. "It's wrong. What did you do?"

"I didn't do a thing," Rebekah says. "This was all at the hands of your witchy friend. Bonnie's a lovely girl, you know. Bitter. Full of rage. Terribly misguided." She smiles at me, and she's all teeth. "Lovely."

"If you hurt her -"

"I didn't do a thing. I told you." I seriously don't know how she's walking in those heels. I'd have snapped an ankle. "Bonnie did all of this on her own."

"What, exactly, is _this_?"

"A happy accident?" She gestures at the group of girls dancing in the parking lot of the Tasty Freeze. "Look at all the fun they're having. The time of their lives," she says cheerfully.

I stop walking. Rebekah continues for a few steps, then swivels slowly.

"I want to know what's going on," I say. "I want to know what happened, and I want to know why it's happening. And I want to know what you're doing with Bonnie."

"You're rather tiresome, aren't you?" Rebekah pouts. "Fine. I suppose I'll just have to show you, then."

"Show me what?" I ask, but Rebekah's already striding off toward the school, her impossibly high heels looking like the hooves of some exotic animal.

Bonnie is waiting on the steps outside the school. She closes the book in her lap and stands as we walk up. "There you are," she says, but the smile on her face is directed at Rebekah.

"Your friend is walks terrifically slowly," Rebekah drawls. "Honestly I don't know how you people get anywhere, crawling like ants."

"You said you had something to show me," I say.

Bonnie grins at me. It's her normal sunny smile; I can't see anything about it that looks different from how she usually looks, but it sends a chill up my spine all the same. "Elena, you're not going to believe this," Bonnie says.

She reaches her hand out, and after a momentary hesitation, I take it. Nothing happens, except that now I'm holding Bonnie's hand.

Rebekah makes a sound that might be a laugh.

Bonnie smiles at me again. She tugs me inside the school. Our footfalls echo in the empty halls.

Just ours; Rebekah hasn't followed. "Bonnie," I whisper urgently. "What's going on?"

Bonnie blinks at me. "Why are you whispering?"

"Are you compelled? Did she make you act like this?"

"Witches can't be compelled, Elena." Bonnie squeezes my hand. "You've got this all wrong. Rebekah isn't like the others."

"What others?"

"The other vampires. She's...different. Like me."

I frown at her. "What does that mean?"

"It means I can trust her."

"You said she's like you. Do you mean that Rebekah's a witch?" I frown some more; my face is beginning to hurt with it. "Rebekah told me vampires can't be witches. It's one or the other, she said."

Bonnie smiles. "Not exactly. Come on."

She leads me to the gym, ducks under the Caution tape. I follow and then stop suddenly. For a second I'm not sure what I'm seeing.

The gym hasn't collapsed; it's gone. The slick wooden floor, the bleachers, the basketball hoops - all have just disappeared like they were never there at all.

In their place is what looks a lot like the inside of an old house, all moldering curtains and dust. There's a fire pit in the center of the room, cold and thick with ash, some chairs and a roughly-hewn table. The table is littered with scrolls, some of which look like they've been splashed with blood.

"What is this?" I ask.

"A pocket in time," Bonnie says. "The witch who lived here was able to save this moment."

"Why?"

"She was dying," Bonnie said simply. "Her last act was to preserve a perfect memory of her home exactly as it had been. She knew that the spells contained in these scrolls would be necessary, and she knew that they would be destroyed."

I look at Bonnie's face, but she doesn't look particularly upset. "Who was the witch?" I ask.

"Don't you know?" Bonnie's eyes meet mine.

And then I do. The room matches the description Rebekah gave me of her childhood home. The witch who died here was the Original Witch.

Rebekah's mother.


	9. Chapter 9

"When Klaus killed her, it wasn't out of anger," Bonnie tells me. "It was necessity."

I want to sit down, but everything seems to be covered in a layer of ancient dust and I really, really don't like the idea of getting it all over my jeans. "How is killing your mother a necessity?"

Bonnie seems to weigh her words. "The story Rebekah told you, about the Original vampires and how they came to be," she says slowly. "That isn't the whole story. There were vampires that came before."

"How is that possible?" I asked. _Damon __needs __to __know __this_, I think, and push the thought down as quickly as I can. I can't tell anymore what Damon _actually_ needs to know and what I just want to tell him.

"How do you think they knew how to create vampires in the first place? Why do you think they came to Mystic Falls?"

"They were fleeing the plague," I say.

Bonnie shakes her head. "Elena - they were banished."

I stare at her.

"Their first child, the one who died? He died when they _first_ attempted to go against the laws of nature and make themselves immortal. The elders cast them out. The witch Ayana was sent with them, to watch over them and make sure they didn't try the immortality spell again." She shakes her head. "Rebekah probably never knew."

"How do _you_ know?"

Bonnie gestures. "The scrolls."

I skirt carefully around the fire pit and approach the table. Several of the scrolls are still rolled and secured by strips of leather, but there are a few open on the table. Those are the ones that are splattered with what looks like -

"Blood," Bonnie says. "Rebekah's mother's blood. It's what's sealing the spell that allows us to enter this room."

"Us," I say quietly. "Where's Rebekah?"

"She can't come in here at all," Bonnie says. "She may be a witch's daughter, but her energy is still unnatural. If she crosses the threshold, the spell will be shattered."

"And the gym will be a gym again?"

"Basically," Bonnie says.

I touch one of the open scrolls with the tip of my finger. "What language is this?"

"Ancient Bulgarian," Bonnie says.

I look at her sharply. "But that's -"

"That's why we needed you," she says, and for the first time her eyes look a little sad. "Elena, I can interact with the room, but I can't touch the scrolls. Only a direct descendant of the person who created them can. A Petrova. That's you."

I pull my finger back from the scroll as though I've been burned. "Bonnie, that's crazy. Katerina Petrova was born hundreds of years _after_ the Original family was turned. There's no way she could have written these scrolls."

"You're right," Bonnie says. "It wasn't Katherine."

"Then why -"

"It was the first Petrova. The one who started it all. The Originals, the Doppelganger Curse. When they became vampires, the Original Family drank her blood." She looks at me. "It all comes back here, Elena. _This_ is what Klaus didn't want anyone to see. This is why he had to kill his mother." Her eyes drift to the scrolls. "Everything we ever needed to know is right here."

"Everything we need for what?"

"The door between the spirit world and this one is still open. Nature is still out of balance. My Grams..." Bonnie reaches a hand toward the scrolls, but pulls it back before she gets close enough to touch. I wonder if she's tried before. "I can contact Ayana. I can use the information in these scrolls to get her to help me. I can make things right."

I realize I've taken my phone out of my pocket and started a text to Damon. I hit Cancel and look up at Bonnie. "So what do you need me to do?"

"I -"

We both hear the shouts at the same time. I start for the door, but Bonnie holds up her hand. "Wait here," she says. Her high-heeled boots echo like gunshots as she takes off down the hall.

Part of me wants to follow her, but instead I watch my hand reach for one of the scrolls. There are seven of them in total: three unrolled and four rolled. I reach for one of the rolled ones.

It feels solid. Real.

Carefully, I slide the knotted leather loop off and smooth the ancient paper open. It makes a rustling sound, like dried leaves.

The writing is beautiful and completely unintelligible to me, which doesn't seem fair. Shouldn't I have some special doppelganger translation power, instead of just the ability to touch things? I squint at the words, but they don't resolve into anything like English.

I slide the leather band off another one and smooth it open as well. This one has a strange blot of ink on one corner.

I start to unroll the third scroll when I hear Bonnie's footsteps in the hall again, and I don't have an acceptable explanation for what I do next.

"We've got to go," Bonnie says, ducking under the Caution tape again. "There's something that - what are you doing?"

"Nothing," I tell her. "I was just texting someone."

Bonnie frowns, but she reaches for my hand. "We'll come back," she promises, throwing one last longing look over her shoulder at the scrolls. "But right now there's something we both need to deal with."

"What?" I ask her.

"Jeremy," she says. "And Matt."

Great. Boy drama. "Can't that wait?"

"They're outside," Bonnie clarifies. "And I think they're going to fight."

* * *

><p>Bonnie's use of the words <em>going <em>_to_ turns out to be overly optimistic.

"Matt!" I shriek, running toward them. "What are you doing?"

Matt looks over his shoulder at me and I realize he's not whaling on Jeremy; he's holding him back. There's a blossoming bruise high on his left cheekbone. "He jumped me," Matt says. His eyes are confused and a little hurt.

"You _dick_," Jeremy is shouting. "You're supposed to be my _friend_."

Bonnie stops suddenly, doubling over a little like she's the one who's been punched. "Oh my god," she whispers. "He heard about the kiss."

I frown at her and then turn my attention back to my brother. "Let it go, Jer," I shout. "Just walk away. This isn't you."

"Jeremy, it's not Matt's fault," Bonnie calls, and I frown at her again. Bonnie _wasn__'__t_ a victim of the enchantment?

I guess that makes sense, if she was the one who cast it. But if she _did_ cast it deliberately, what the hell was she doing making out with Matt?

In my pocket, my phone makes the pinging noise that announces a new message.

Matt's got Jeremy in some sort of wrestling hold, and I remember suddenly the way they used to mock fight when we were kids. Jeremy would lunge for him, and Matt, always a little bigger and stronger, would hold him down.

Jeremy was clever, though. He could always wriggle his way out of it, jumping free, triumphant. "Can't keep a Gilbert down," he'd crow, and we'd all laugh.

Jeremy's grown since then. He has a good three inches on Matt and the added bonus of righteous fury. No one is laughing now.

My phone pings again, and then a third time.

"Why won't you fight back?" Jeremy yells. Matt just does his best to block him and try for another restraining grab. It's not working; Jeremy is just was wily as he was when he was eleven. "You think I'm that much of a joke?"

Matt looks surprised. "I don't think you're a joke, man," he says, but Jeremy takes the opportunity to hit him in the face again.

"No? You were pretty willing to start something with my girl. Is that how you treat people you _respect_?"

"Jeremy, damn it." Matt grabs him again. Jeremy struggles wildly, and I have to strain to hear Matt's words. "I made a mistake, man. I got carried away in the moment. It won't happen again."

I hold my breath. Nobody moves. I can see the muscles in Matt's arms straining.

"All right," Jeremy says finally. He breaks free of Matt's hold. "All right."

"Jeremy," Bonnie calls, but Jeremy is already halfway across the parking lot, walking so fast it's practically a sprint.

Matt leans over, breathing hard, his hands on his knees. I hurry over to him, put my hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

Matt shakes his head. "I am such a jerk," he says. His blue eyes meet mine, filled with torment. "That kid's practically my family."

I whirl around to face Bonnie. "What did you do?" I demand.

Bonnie finally looks shaken. "I didn't - it wasn't supposed to be like this."

I'm about to ask her what exactly it _was_ supposed to be like when my phone pings again. I pull it out of my pocket and glance at the screen. It's from Damon.

_Get away from Bonnie. Now._

A tickle of fear creeps up my spine. Quickly, I slip the phone back into my pocket. My hands have begun to shake.

"I'll explain everything, Elena," Bonnie is saying. "We just need to get back inside."

From _Bonnie_, he said. Not Rebekah. He wants me to get away from Bonnie.

"No," I say. "I need to talk to my brother. And you need to figure out what's going on with Matt."

"No, Elena, I -"

"Seriously, Bonnie," I say, backing away from her. "Talk to Matt. I'll talk to Jeremy. You owe them at least that much."

I take off after my brother, trying not to look like I'm fleeing the scene.

From the steps of the school, Rebekah calmly watches the whole thing.


	10. Chapter 10

I'm two blocks away and around the corner when Damon's car pulls up next to me. "Get in," he says.

"What's going on? Your text -"

"Not here," he says shortly, and guns the engine. I barely have time to get my seat belt fastened before we're peeling out down the street.

"Where are we going?" I ask when he doesn't take the turn that leads toward the Salvatore house.

Damon doesn't answer, just grips the wheel and stares at the road. He doesn't need to do either of those things; I've been in the car with him often enough to know that his driving style is more of the lackadaisical variety.

We're headed for the Interstate, I realize. "I can't skip town, Damon," I say.

For the first time, he glances at me. "I thought you were all about following your _impulses_," he says, making his eyes go all wide.

"This is your impulse, not mine," I tell him. My impulse, currently, is to grab him by the collar and demand to know what's going on, and then possibly drag my mouth along the line of his neck. I'm pretty sure if I do the first I won't be able to stop myself from doing the second.

He goes back to glaring moodily at the road and I hunch down in the seat, propping my feet on the dash. "I'm guessing that whatever was in those scrolls I sent you -"

"Can we do this later?" Damon snaps. "I'm trying to concentrate on the road."

"You don't need to concentrate on the road, Damon. You're a vampire. Supernatural reflexes? I'm not new."

"Did I say _the __road_? I meant I'm trying to concentrate on _not __talking __to __you_."

I cross my arms over my chest. "Fine. It's not like I'm overcome with delight at the idea of taking a road trip with you."

Damon snorts laughter. "Oh, I very much doubt _that_."

"Whatever. I'm done talking to you."

"Come on, Elena," he says, his voice dropping. "It's just you and me. Miles to go, no one else in sight." His gaze flickers over to me, tracing a line from my eyes to my mouth, and then deliberately down my body. He takes his time getting back to my mouth again. "No one would ever know."

I know it's the enchantment. I know it, so I don't bother to hide the fact that his eyes do things to me. Normally I'd make a joke or say something snarky or just get angry, but my cards are on the table now. I don't have a choice.

"Shut up," I say.

He smirks and looks forward again.

It's the middle of the day and there are hardly any other cars on the road. I find myself stealing glances at Damon's profile, like a lovesick kid, and I force myself to look out the window instead. The scenery is somewhat less than thrilling, but if I'm not gazing at Damon - and I'm _not_ - there isn't anything else to see. I don't even have a paperback with me.

"This is boring," I sigh. "I'm bored. Can't you stop being mad at me for long enough to play slug bug or something?"

"Nope."

"Why did you even bother to pick me up in the first place? I'm sure Alaric would have been just as willing to play knight in shining armor while you, I don't know, had another gabfest with Katherine or something."

"I'm trying to save your life," Damon says. "I'm _impulsive_ like that."

I bite my lip, which reminds me of kissing him, which is not helping at all. "This sucks."

"You know I can tell," Damon says, conversationally.

"Tell what?"

"First, your heartbeat starts to speed up. It's almost like when you're afraid, but not as rapid. Your pupils dilate, just a little." I feel my eyes widening as I realize what he's talking about. "Your breathing gets a little faster, and sometimes you bite your lip." Damon smirks. "You give off this amazing scent, like something about to fall off a vine."

"Oh my god," I say, mortified. I cover my face with my hands.

"And let's not forget the blood rushing to your cheeks. My favorite part." He considers. "Well. My second-favorite part."

I don't want to know what his favorite part is. "Damon," I say from between my fingers, "why are you doing this?"

"The other night when I thought someone had gotten into your room," he murmurs, skating his fingers across the steering wheel in a way that makes my skin contract, "I could hear you thrashing around from the street and I couldn't get to you fast enough. But when I did get there..." He takes an unnecessary breath, like it's hurting him to talk about this. "I can always tell, Elena."

"It isn't -" I say. My hands drop from my face into fists on my thighs, my fingernails biting into my palms. "It's a spell. I'm not like this."

"The thing is, your body doesn't think it's a spell." I look up, and his eyes are on mine. I feel it like a physical jolt. "And _my_ body reacts to _your_ body."

My palms ache to feel his body, reacting. _I __could __do __things __to __you __that __you __can__'__t __even __imagine_, he said the other day, but I think he's underestimating the fact that I have an _extremely_ vivid imagination. I drag my teeth over my lower lip and feel myself angling toward him on the seat, inching closer.

Damon looks away from me abruptly. "And that's why I'm not talking to you," he finishes, his voice slightly raspier than usual.

Oh. "I'm not -" I take a breath. "It's not on purpose."

"I _know_ that," he says. "Trust me."

"I would fix it if I knew how," I say.

"Stop _talking_, Elena."

"It's just - the other night. I woke up from this dream." Why am I still talking? It's like my mouth is reading from a completely different script. "That I was kissing you."

"Elena, just _stop_ - wait. What did you say?"

"I dreamed that I was kissing you."

Damon turns to look at me, the pretense of keeping his eyes on the road forgotten. "You need to tell me more. Right now."

I fidget uncomfortably. His eyes are like Klieg lights, blinding in their intensity. "It was just a dream."

"And you need to start talking."

"Okay," I say, uncertainly. "We were - on my porch, I think? And you, you kissed me on the cheek. It was supposed to be sweet, I think, but then -"

"Then I kissed you on the mouth."

My face gets uncomfortably hot. "And I kissed you back."

He closes his eyes for a second. He's _incredibly_ beautiful. I mean, it's not like I haven't noticed that before, but in this moment - eyes closed, lips parted, a look of mingled relief and abject fury on his face - he's the most exquisite thing I've ever seen.

Then he turns back to the road. "I am going to _kill_ that little witch friend of yours," he snarls, and the illusion is broken. "And then I am going to kill her again. And possibly a third time, just for giggles."

"Damon, what the _hell_."

"Elena," he says, and something in his voice makes my blood run cold. "You really need to not talk to me right now."

I spend the rest of the ride staring fixedly out the window, fighting not to touch him, trying to figure out why I want so badly to cry.

* * *

><p>An excruciating hour and fifteen minutes later Damon pulls up in front of a dilapidated old house in the absolute middle of the middle of nowhere. I can see Alaric's SUV parked near a water pump.<p>

Damon gets out without a word to me and strides toward the house, his broad shoulders tense and coiled the way they are before a fight.

I assume that means I'm not supposed to stay in the car. Not that I'd do that, anyway. I scramble out and follow him to the door.

"Who all is here?" I ask.

"Ric. Blondie. Wolf boy. Your brother. The usual suspects," Damon says without looking at me. A muscle in his jaw is flexing, holding back whatever else he might say.

I want to take his face in my hands the way I did after the showdown with Klaus. I want to feel him go still beneath me, calm. I shove my hands in my pockets instead.

He crosses the threshold on his own, so either he's been here before or it's abandoned. My money's on abandoned. The place is in shambles, although someone obviously cleaned it out before we arrived. There's a threadbare couch, which Damon flops down on the second we're inside, but the other furniture is either gone or has crumbled where it stood - which, looking at the state of the couch, is a very real possibility.

Everyone else is sitting on the floor on some incongruously bright upholstered cushions. "Here you go, Elena," Caroline chirps, holding one out to me. "I stopped by Target on our way."

"Caroline apparently thought pillows were a vital part of the mission," Tyler deadpans.

"They're not _pillows_, they're _floor __cushions_. And yes."

Spread across the floor are enlargements of the pictures I took on my phone of the scrolls. Alaric is scribbling translations in a notebook, and occasionally affixing post-it notes to relevant sections of the photos.

"Caroline, where have you been?" I ask. "I've been calling."

"Oh," she says, her smile too bright. "Tyler and I have just been, you know -"

"Talking," Tyler says. "We've been talking."

"A lot," Caroline says. "It turns out we have a _lot_ to...talk...about."

"Okay," I say, suddenly very interested in not knowing any more.

I take the cushion and bring it over to where Jeremy is sitting. He's the only one who isn't poring over the scrolls. Instead, he's got his head leaned back against the wall and is staring miserably into space. "Hey," I say, sitting down. "You okay?"

Jeremy shrugs. "Other than that I kicked Matt's ass for what turns out to be nothing? I'm fine."

"You didn't, though," I say. "You were under the enchantment just as much as he was."

"But Bonnie wasn't," he says. His voice is bitter. "Was she, Elena?"

Bonnie. I don't know what to think of her right now. I put my hand on his arm. "Jer, we're all behaving strangely," I say, and there is a snorting noise from the direction of the couch. I ignore it. "I don't know what's going on with Bonnie, but you should at least talk to her. Later," I amend. "Once all of this is resolved."

"Easy for you to say," Jeremy says, shrugging his arm out from under my hand. "You didn't just have your heart ripped out."

I glance toward Damon, who is pointedly not looking at me. He still looks furious about something I said in the car, but fury suits him, brings out the blue in his eyes and the sharp angle of his jaw. Everything about him is in high relief: the tendons in his neck, the muscles in his arms. He flexes the fingers of his right hand, his fingers clenching, releasing, like a heartbeat.

I can suddenly understand the appeal of angry sex. I stop myself from biting my lip.

Abruptly, Caroline is on her feet. "Elena, come help me," she says brightly, holding out her hand to me.

"Help you with what?" I ask. Her grip is like steel.

"Just - upstairs. Okay?"

Gamely, I follow her up the rickety stairs. I think I see Damon glance at me, but then he's studying the photos so intently that it must have been my imagination. His whole posture is a contradiction: relaxed and tense, sprawled and coiled.

There are bedrooms, each with a heavy wooden door that's only barely rotted through. Caroline drags me into one, shutting the door and then letting me go.

"What," she hisses, "is going on?"

I try not to look at her, her too-bright eyes and eager face. "Nothing, Caroline."

"Shhh," she says, savagely. "They'll hear you."

"They'll hear us anyway," I say, but I drop my voice all the same. "Seriously. There is nothing going on." I make my eyes very wide. "Nothing."

"It didn't look like _nothing_. It looked like you were mentally undressing a Salvatore. The _wrong_ Salvatore." She studies me in a way that is way too intense for my liking. "Is something going on, Elena?"

"The spell," I admit reluctantly. "It sort of...amplifies. Things. Things maybe you shouldn't do."

"Oh," she breathes. "And he's your 'thing you shouldn't do.' Is that why you've been trying to call me?"

I nod, miserable tears filling my eyes.

"Hey," Caroline says. "Hey. Did he take advantage of you? Because I can totally kick his ass."

"He hasn't taken advantage of anything, Caroline. I'm the one who's acting like a cat in heat. It's like he doesn't want anything to do with me," I whisper as quietly as I can. "He wouldn't even _talk _to me for the last hundred miles in the car."

"Damon's fickle. And also a psychopath," she whispers reassuringly. "He was probably just preoccupied with his usual unending stream of homicidal daydreams. Or he was picturing you naked. Or, you know, both."

"I don't think he was picturing me naked," I say, but my brain goes to a very bad place for a moment.

Caroline coughs politely. "Dial it down a notch, pheromone girl."

"It's the _spell_," I say. "Besides, he's acting like he hates me now."

She gives me a look. "A, like that's going to happen. The guy's been gaga over you since forever. What, you think no one else has noticed? We just didn't say anything because ew, Damon. Which brings me to B, why do you care whether he cares?"

"I don't," I whisper. It doesn't sound remotely convincing, even to my ears. "But - oh god, Caroline. What if he only wanted me when he couldn't have me?"

"Again I ask, why do you care?"

"Because I was practically throwing myself at him and he wouldn't even look at me!"

"Well, duh, Elena. It's a spell. Think about it this way," she says. "If someone cast a spell on Stefan to make him nice again, but you knew it was fake, would you just accept it? Knowing it was going to end and you'd be back where you are now?"

"I -" I open my mouth, close it again. I honestly don't know the answer to her question. _Would_ I want Stefan back, knowing what he'd done? Knowing what he'd _chosen_?

I shake my head; I can't think of Stefan. It hurts too much to think of Stefan.

"I think maybe -" I begin, but Caroline lifts her head up suddenly, her whole body tense.

"Oh my god," she breathes, and then the door's open and she's down the stairs, faster than I can see.

I follow at a more normal speed, but when I see the person standing in the entry, I freeze.

Katherine.


	11. Chapter 11

"Oh, good, the gang's all here," she says flatly.

"Hello to you too, Katherine," Damon says from the couch.

Caroline stands at the foot of the stairs, looking like she can't decide whether to run away or start a fight. "What's _she_ doing here?" she asks. She looks around. "Why am I the only one who isn't freaking out here?"

"What's the matter, sweetheart," Katherine says, her voice a low purr, "did you miss me?"

"As if."

"Leave her alone," Tyler says, getting to his feet.

"Oh, the hybrid," Katherine drawls. "You going to drool on me, wolf boy?"

"Quit messing with the baby vamps," Damon sighs.

"Why? Are they your pets now, too?" Katherine asks him, shooting me a sidelong glance.

"No," Damon says. "They're just annoyingly easy targets. Are you going to help, or what?"

"Show me the scrolls," Katherine says, brushing past Caroline on the way to the main room.

"God, Damon, _you __called __her_?" I ask shrilly. "Again?"

Six heads swivel to look at me. I realize how those words sound coming out of my mouth and suddenly I'm struggling not to blush.

"Oh, that's right," Katherine says, her mouth curling into a slow smile. "The enchantment. How...awkward for you." She keeps her eyes on me as she settles onto the couch next to Damon.

_Right_ next to Damon.

"Right," Alaric says. "There are seven scrolls total. Elena got pictures of three of them. Bonnie indicated that the other three had to do with the true history of the Originals, but we don't know much beyond what she told Elena."

"That's inconvenient," Katherine says. She wriggles a little closer to Damon, who looks vaguely annoyed but doesn't move out of her way. "What about the seventh scroll?"

"I didn't have a chance to unroll it," I say through gritted teeth. "Bonnie was on her way back."

"And you and Glinda are on the outs, huh? Pity." Katherine finally shifts her eyes away from mine and glances down at the photos. "I'll need a little time. The dialect is somewhat...antiquated."

"It's a thousand years old," I snap. "That's sort of the point."

Katherine smiles. "This is going to be more fun than I thought."

"Take your time," says Alaric, frowning at Katherine. "Until we know what we're dealing with, there's not a lot we can do."

"Wait," I say. "I thought Damon already knew what the scrolls said. Isn't that why you snatched me up and went all road-trip crazy?"

"Yes, that's the ideal way to thank the man who saved your life, Elena."

"If you don't know what the scrolls say," I point out, "you have no idea if you just saved my life."

Damon scowls at me. "I know a little Bulgarian. Enough to know that you were in danger. Speaking of," he says, tearing his eyes away from me and turning his manic gaze on Tyler, "you and I need to have a little chat about a mutual annoyance."

"What? Me?"

"Yes, you. Kitchen," Damon says, jutting his chin and getting up off the couch. I resolutely do not notice the way Katherine trails her fingers down the outside of his leg as he stands.

Caroline's eyes follow Tyler as he and Damon go in the direction of what I can only assume is the kitchen. _What?_ I mouth at her, and she shrugs delicately: _I __don__'__t __know._

My phone rings, startling me. I look at the screen: Bonnie.

I let it go to voicemail. A moment later I've got a text: _Elena, __where __are __you? __Is __everything __OK?_

Nothing is okay. I look around. Alaric and Jeremy have their heads together over one of the scrolls, pointing to some words and doing searches on their phones. Katherine has picked up one of the photos and is studying it carefully. Caroline has her arms crossed and an intent look on her face; I'd be willing to bet she's trying to eavesdrop on the conversation from the kitchen, and for the first time I envy her the supervamp hearing.

Except that this is an old house, and old houses are ideal for listening to things you aren't supposed to hear, even if you don't have a super power.

"Where are you going, Elena?" Caroline asks me.

"Oh. I'm just going back upstairs." I gesture vaguely. "Long day. Head hurts. Not in the mood to learn Bulgarian with psychopaths who have my face."

"Aaw, I've missed you too," Katherine coos from the couch.

As quietly as I can, I tiptoe across the upper level, peering inside each door. There's the bedroom where Caroline and I talked, empty except for a dusty headboard and footboard propped against one wall. The other bedroom has an old wooden dresser, the drawers all pulled out and empty, and a box spring in the middle of the floor. There's a linen closet.

And a bathroom. One with an old-fashioned metal grate in the wall.

Perfect.

"...inside my head," Damon is saying. "And I really, really don't like it when people get inside my head. Especially witchy people."

"Well, how do you know?" Tyler asks. "Maybe it was just the enchantment, same as for Elena and everybody else."

"It's not the enchantment," Damon snaps. "The enchantment doesn't affect vampires. No, this was something else. Something deliberate."

"How do you know," Tyler asks again.

I shift positions, trying not to let the cracked tiles cut into my palms.

"...fell asleep," Damon is saying. "I never fall asleep like that, not when I'm watching _her_. And then Elena had a dream. _My_ dream. The witch got inside my head."

Wait. That was _Damon__'__s_ dream?

"Not a dream," Katherine says, materializing behind me. I jump backward, falling against the side of the toilet. _Gross_.

"What do you want?" I say, getting hastily to my feet and wiping my palms on my jeans.

"Not a dream," she repeats. "A memory."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I say. It's difficult to maintain my dignity while trying to scrape tile dust from my knees.

"Damon wouldn't be so uncomfortable about the whole thing if it had just been a dream. His memories, on the other hand?" She twists her hair around her finger. "Sometimes a man's memories are all he has."

"You don't know anything about it," I say. "And I thought you were translating."

"I am. I'm multitasking." She props one leg up against the door frame. "So what was the memory? I have to admit, I am curious."

"It was nothing," I say, but of course my mouth just keeps going. "It was a kiss."

"A kiss?" Katherine says. Her brow arches ridiculously high. "Damon Salvatore, all in a tizzy over a kiss. Must really have been something - he's not exactly inexperienced in that department."

"Go away, Katherine," I tell her, and then I clamp my jaw shut so my traitor mouth doesn't tell her exactly how much I know about Damon's kissing technique.

Her eyes narrow. "But there _was_ something special about that kiss, wasn't there?" She drops her leg from the door frame, stalks toward me like a cat. "Not the _what_, but the _who_."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I say.

"Tell me, Elena. Was it on your porch? Did he smell like lighter fluid and desperation?" She angles her chin downward, looks at me through her eyelashes. "Was it Founder's Day?"

I open my mouth to say no, of course it wasn't, but then I remember.

The slight scent of smoke.

Damon's haunted eyes.

His hands tangled in my curling hair.

My hair doesn't curl. And there's only one way Katherine would know that much about the kiss Damon was dreaming about. "It was you," I breathe, and the whole thing comes crashing down around my head.

"Bingo," Katherine says.

* * *

><p>"The Petrova doppelganger wasn't created as a safeguard for Klaus," Katherine tells us. "It's a curse."<p>

"Of course you would see it that way," Jeremy says. Then he glances at me. "Sorry, Elena."

I shrug. I'm sort of inclined to go with the whole curse theory, myself. Especially since I've spent the last few days making an extreme fool of myself because of a case of mistaken identity.

Damon shifts position on the couch. I can't even look at him. It hurts - physically hurts - to be in the same room that he is. I know it's the spell, but no matter how many times I tell myself that I can't stop remembering how I launched myself at him in his living room, the way he pulled me close to him and then pushed me away.

And no matter how many times I tell myself that it was a stupid mistake, I still want to do it again.

"There had been vampires in Bulgaria long before history was recorded, but they had been wiped out. Massacred. The Elders had declared it an abomination to create new vampires."

"Oh, goodie," Caroline mutters. "A history lesson."

He kissed _Katherine_. Not me. He was dreaming about _her_ and I just picked up on it, like some malfunctioning psychic short-range radio.

Alaric gives Caroline a look. "These scrolls are the written recollections of the spell for creating new vampires. It was forbidden, but some families passed down stories from generation to generation." He glances at Katherine, then at me. "The scrolls that Rebekah's mother had were created by the Petrova family."

"Your ancestors," Katherine drawls, nudging me with her foot. "And mine."

Damon makes a noise. "So your ancestors were just as devious and amoral as you are," he says. There's a pause, and he nudges me like Katherine did. "Sorry, Elena."

I flinch away from him. Caroline blinks at me from the other side of the room. _What? _she mouths, and I shake my head.

No wonder he hasn't been showing any interest in my blundering, ungraceful attraction to him. _My __body __responds __to __your __body_, he said, and it didn't occur to me to wonder if that was it. Bodies, responding to each other.

_Except __wasn__'__t __that __all __it __was __for __you, __Elena?_ a voice whispers in my head. _Isn__'__t __what __you__'__re __feeling __for __Damon __nothing __more __than __physical __attraction?_

"I don't understand how this relates to Elena," Caroline is saying. "Why is she in danger because of some spell that created vampires?"

"Because the spell didn't just create vampires," Alaric says. "It created the doppelganger."

"The Petrova family provided the spell," says Jeremy. "They even provided the first sacrifice. The blood the Original Family drank with their wine, before Papa Original killed them? That was the blood of the oldest Petrova daughter."

"When the Original Witch used the immortality spell in the scrolls," Katherine says, taking over, "the witch Ayana cursed her and the Petrova family. For every five hundred years that the Originals walked the earth, a new Petrova doppelganger would be born. She would be cursed to suffer the same fate as the original Petrova and the cycle would continue."

"Which was?" Caroline asks. "What? I'm curious."

"Death," Alaric says.

The room gets very quiet.

"But we did that already," I say. "Klaus killed me. End of prophecy."

"Not exactly." Katherine points to a passage in one of the scrolls. "You're not actually dead, as you might have noticed."

"There's a reason for that, too," Jeremy supplies helpfully.

"The Petrova family had some magic of their own. They protected the doppelganger by making her _lyubim_."

"For those of us who don't speak doppelganger?" Caroline says.

"It means _beloved_. Which is exactly the reason we Petrova girls tend to inspire loyalty and adoration from those around us." Katherine smiles charmingly.

"Must have skipped a generation in Katherine's case," Damon mutters.

Katherine makes a face at him, then looks at me, her smile disappearing. "And then there's the other part of the curse. As long as the doppelganger walks the earth, the Original Witch will suffer for it. Doesn't seem fair, does it? After all, it was her husband who did all the actual killing." Katherine sighs dramatically. "Just another example of a woman paying the price for a man's mistakes."

"Please. Like you know what it's like to pay for anything," Damon says.

"I suffered for the original Petrova family, just like Elena has," Katherine shoots back. "We're all paying the price for her family's transgression, Damon. Even you."

Listening to them banter is like scrubbing my skin with steel wool. I frown at Katherine. "That's why the Original Witch is trying to get through," I say. "To find a way to end her pain."

"She _knows_ the way," Katherine says. "If the doppelganger is killed - permanently - the witch will be free. At least for the next five hundred years, anyway. Why do you think so many of these prophecies involve your death?"

"Take down the doppelganger, and the Original Witch gets her happily ever after," Damon says. He doesn't take his eyes off me. "You're like their ultimate Cracker Jack prize."

I look at him. I don't mean to. He's leaning toward me, his eyes very serious and very, very blue, and I feel that stabbing sensation again. My breathing is suddenly shallow, like there's not enough air in the room.

Why do I still feel like this? I know that it was Katherine he was dreaming about, so there's no reason for me to still be so stupid around him. And yet.

"I don't understand," I say, wrenching my eyes away from Damon. "Why would Bonnie agree to help with this? She said she wasn't compelled."

"She didn't know about these scrolls, though, right?" Caroline says. "They were rolled up. Bonnie couldn't have had any idea that Elena was going to be in danger."

"Tell her the other part," Jeremy says.

Alaric shuffles through the pictures of the scrolls, finding one and handing it to me. It's the scroll with the inkblot at one corner. "The Petrova curse is mentioned here," he says, pointing. "And this is the ritual for killing the doppelganger. But there's a bit at the bottom that was cut off. I think it's continued on the seventh scroll. It says -"

My phone makes a pinging noise, and everyone jumps. Guiltily, I pull it out and glance at the text message on the screen.

I look up at the faces of my friends, and I know they can see it in my expression, because my own panic is reflected back at me. "It's Bonnie." I hold up the phone, my hands shaking. "Rebekah is on her way here."

Things move very fast after that.


	12. Chapter 12

"Caroline! Door," Damon barks. He's jumped over the back of the couch and has me securely by the arms before I register that he's moved. "Jeremy, Alaric -"

"We're on it," Jeremy says. Alaric tosses him a duffel bag and they're pulling out weapons, stakes.

"Where's Tyler?" Caroline asks.

"Katherine, get out of here," Damon says as though he hasn't heard her. I try to crane my neck around to see his face but he's holding me too tightly.

"With pleasure," Katherine says.

"What about me?" I squeak. I don't mean to squeak, but he's holding me _very_ tightly.

"You're with me," Damon says. He pulls me backward so fast he's almost dragging me.

"Damon, _where __is __Tyler?_" Caroline demands, starting toward us.

"He's not here," Damon grits. "I sent him on a special little side-mission."

"And you didn't -"

"_Later_, Caroline."

Caroline snaps her mouth shut and turns back to the door, and Damon and I plunge into the darkness.

It's sudden and startling and I grab his arms, burgeoning panic making my pulse race. I open my mouth to say something and Damon clamps a hand over it. "Wait," he breathes into my ear, almost too quietly to hear. I shiver without meaning to.

His palm against my lips is almost like a kiss. I immediately begin an internal struggle: sneak my tongue out and taste his skin? Or behave like a rational human being?

Damon removes his hand from my mouth and spins me around, changing his grip so that he's holding me against his chest, my feet inches from the floor. My heartbeat doesn't slow down, but now it's racing for another reason. _Stupid __heart_, I think. _It __doesn__'__t __know __when __it__'__s __supposed __to __be __broken._

_Wait, what?_

"Up," Damon breathes. He hooks a hand under one of my knees and brings it up to his waist.

My mind goes immediately and carefully blank.

Damon gives me a little shake. "Elena," he hisses. "I need to carry you."

Oh. Right. This is that _other_ kind of wrapping my legs around Damon's waist. I can't imagine what _I_ was thinking of.

Damon's fingers press into the flesh of my right thigh while I swing my other leg around. He hitches me up once, settling me against him, and I have another split-second of utter blankness. I hook my ankles together behind his back and wrap my arms around his shoulders.

For the space of a heartbeat, Damon doesn't move at all. I swear I can feel him tremble. But it must be my imagination, because then he's in motion.

I can't see a thing, but I can feel the air get colder, more stale as we descend. It smells like mildew and metal. Damon's footsteps are almost soundless on the rickety wooden stairs. I squeeze my eyes shut and tighten my arms, trying not to notice the way his muscles move beneath my thighs, the way my breasts are pressing into his chest, the way my mouth is so close to his neck. His skin. I can smell him, a combination of spicy sweat and whatever laundry detergent he uses, the scent of friction and tangled limbs and darkness.

There's a whoosh and a clanging sound and I scrabble against Damon, all clutching arms and legs. Which is lucky, because that's the moment he abruptly lets go of me.

"We'll be safe here," he says. He waits a beat. "You can let go of me now, Elena."

My body cries out in protest as I unwrap myself from Damon and drop to the floor.

"Where are we?"

"Underground bunker," Damon says. "Built in the forties to withstand a nuclear bomb. If we're lucky, it'll survive Hurricane Rebekah."

"But it's just us," I say.

"Yep. Just the two of us." I hear rather than see Damon moving away from me, and then there's a flare and a candle comes to life.

"What about Jeremy? And Caroline, and Alaric?" I consider listing Katherine for about a tenth of a second, but she's gone anyway.

"They'll be fine," Damon says.

"They're _vulnerable_, Damon. If Rebekah doesn't find me, what do you think she's going to do to them?"

"Nothing. Because I have a plan."

"Oh, a _plan_, " I say, throwing myself down on one of the cots against the nearest wall. "Hallelujah, he has a plan. We're all saved."

"Have I mentioned that you sound _just_ like Katherine when you're pissed off?" He eyebrows at me. "It's kind of hot."

And there it is, out in the open. For a second I just stare at him. I want to go on about my friends, but more than that I want to say something cutting, something that will make him feel a fraction of the hurt I feel. The best I can come up with is "You _wish_," which is incredibly lame but - I'm hot when I'm like _Katherine? _Seriously?

I cross my arms over my chest and turn my body so I'm facing the wall.

"Don't sulk," Damon says absently. He's looking through the drawers and boxes, opening things, closing them again. "It's very distracting."

I'm not going to cry. There's no point in crying. I was an idiot to think that he actually loved me, because Damon doesn't _love_ things. He obsesses over them. He _wants_ them with every fiber of his being, but he doesn't _love_ them.

Not that I care whether or not Damon loves me.

Except that right now it's all I care about.

"Hey. _Hey_." He's by my side in an instant, turning me to face him. In the flickering candlelight I can't tell if he's furious or mortified or concerned. "Are you crying?"

"No," I sniffle. "And you're an ass."

"Elena, they'll be _fine_," he says again, gripping my shoulders and looking hard into my eyes. "I sent Tyler to get Bonnie, to tell her about the rest of the scrolls. As soon as she realizes what Rebekah is really up to, she'll end it. I wouldn't put them in danger," he says, and the ridiculous thing is, I think he really believes it. "I know what they mean to you."

I nod once, turning my head back toward the wall. I don't bother with the soliloquy about how I can't just sit quietly while everyone else is in peril. He knows that one already, and besides, there's nothing I can do about it.

"You're still crying," Damon points out, uncomfortably.

"You're still an ass."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No, Damon, I do not want to talk about it," I say, my voice only hitching a little. "Do _you_ want to talk about the fact you really want Katherine and I'm just the closest you can get?"

He lets go of my shoulders so suddenly I fall forward a little. "What?"

"She told me," I say. "She told me about how it wasn't a dream of me kissing you, it was a memory of _you_ kissing _her_. She told me I was just her placeholder." Maybe she hadn't used those words, exactly, but the gist was there.

Damon laughs. He _laughs_. "That bitch," he says. He isn't looking at me anymore.

I expect him to get up, to move across the room and away from me now that he knows I know the score. But instead he leans his head back against the wall I'm facing, so that if I turn my head the tiniest bit to the left I'll be facing him instead. "You're an idiot," he tells me.

I snort. "Way to make me feel better, Damon."

"But you're under a spell, so I guess I should cut you a break."

"What does this have to do with -"

"Do you remember," Damon says conversationally, "what you said to me the day _after _your father tried to barbecue me on Founder's Day? I asked you if it was so surprising that I'd kissed you."

"And I said what was surprising was that you thought I'd..." I stop.

_I__'__m __surprised __you __thought __I__'__d __kiss __you __back_. That's what I said.

I remember his face, suddenly. Not just the momentary glimpse of hurt when I told him I'd never kiss him, but the look of anger and relief when I told him about the dream in the car. _And __I __kissed __you __back_, I think were the exact words I used.

"I meant what I said, Elena," Damon tells me. His voice is uncharacteristically without venom.

"You say a lot of things, Damon."

"They're all true," he says absently, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. The place where his fingers touch flares and trills, like the nerve endings are all singing at once.

Then he pulls his hand back and hits his head against the wall, once, before moving away from me on the cot, and I remember why I feel so hollow.

"But you still don't want me," I say flatly. "I've been throwing myself at you and you can barely even stand to be in the same room as me."

Damon opens his eyes, and I'm shocked by the fury in his expression. "You," he says through gritted teeth, "are an _idiot_."

I blink at him. "Then why -?"

In a flash he's on me, flipping me around and tossing me flat on my back on the cot. The springs creak as I bounce upward and then his hands are on my shoulders, holding me down. "Because it's not _real_," he snarls.

My heart races, either from a sudden hit of adrenaline or the nearness of Damon or both. He's trembling, all coiled muscle and furious energy, but his face looks like it does when I'm in danger and he doesn't know how to save me. I try to wriggle out from under him but he presses his whole body down to hold me still, and _oh __my __god_.

Maybe I was wrong about Damon not wanting me.

(_My __body __reacts __to __your __body_, he whispers in my head.)

"If I thought for a second," he says, and his eyes meet mine then. They're silver in the dim light, flickering, roving over my face.

"If you thought what?" I ask. My voice is hoarse, but that sense of spinning is back, the sensation that everything around us is in motion and we are the only fixed points on the map.

I know what it's like to want things. I know what it's like to be caught up in the first heady throes of new love, when all you can think about is calling him, seeing him, talking to him. I know the thrill of stolen glances and accidental first touches.

This is not that. I look at Damon and I drown, and it's only when I open my mouth and take in my first lungful of water that I realize I've been below the surface for a long time, holding my breath, treading water. Pretending I am still afloat.

I don't know what he sees on my face, but it makes him inhale sharply. "Don't," he says.

"It wasn't the first time I've dreamed of you," I say quietly.

"_Don__'__t_," Damon says again, and his hands tighten on my shoulders almost painfully.

I want to go on. I want to tell him he's the first person I look for when I come into a room, and how long has that been going on? I want to explain to him that it isn't new, the way my heart goes crazy when he touches me. I want to tell him I was wrong.

Instead, I lift my head off the cot and lightly drag my lips along the line of his jaw.

"Elena," Damon says. He's shaking hard, the way I shake when I've done too many push-ups. Like at any moment he will collapse. "You need to stop. _Now_."

"Why?" I ask. I dart my tongue out to taste the skin of his throat.

Damon's whole body spasms and he pushes away from me, flying to the other end of the cot so quickly I can't follow the movement. He stares at me, breathing hard, when I know he doesn't need to _breathe_ at all.

I've crossed a line, and I don't even care. I sit up and crawl toward him, my eyes on his mouth. "I don't know the difference anymore," I whisper. "I don't know where the spell stops and I begin. It _feels_ real, Damon."

He sighs, and his eyes flutter closed for a moment. He brings his head down slowly, until his lips are millimeters from mine. I can feel his breath as he murmurs, "Did it feel real with Stefan?"


	13. Chapter 13

We stare at each other from opposite sides of the cot, like prizefighters squaring off for a match.

"That's not fair."

"It's perfectly fair. It's the elephant in the room, isn't it? Stefan and Elena with their sprawling, epic love story." The candlelight gives movement to his face, changes his expression with every shift of the air.

Or maybe it's his face doing that. "You of all people should understand why I don't want to talk about Stefan," I say, hugging my knees to my chest. "You're just as heartbroken as I am, Damon."

"If you think that's the reason I'm heartbroken, you're more deluded than I thought," Damon snaps.

"What, you're just upset because you're stuck in Mystic Falls on babysitting duty while Stefan is off ripping people's throats out for kicks?"

"_Yes_."

"Bullshit." I push my hair out of my face and glare at him. "You're heartbroken for the same reason I'm heartbroken: because he made his choice, and he didn't choose us."

"No, Elena," Damon says. "He didn't choose _you_. That's what this is really about. He left you, and he isn't going to be back in what you think of as his _right mind_ until long after you're dead." He glares at me. "And here I am, all lovesick lapdog to your pining princess. Of course you want me, because the alternative is being alone. Being someone who was _left_."

"Is that what you think? Because I think you're just too scared to admit that there's something between us."

"This is a refreshing role reversal, but you're forgetting the salient point, which is that _you __don__'__t __love __me_."

The silence between us is huge and heavy. I stare at him until it hurts too much to stare at him, and then I stare at the candle until the flame is burned into my retinas.

"What if I do?" I ask quietly.

"You don't," Damon says. "Trust me. I know love."

"Because you waited a hundred and fifty years for someone you thought loved you back?"

"No," Damon says. "Because I will wait another seventy for someone who doesn't."

I look at him slowly, watch the afterimage of the candle flame fade into his face. He's looking at me with the saddest, most open expression I have ever seen, and my heart cracks and breaks and bleeds in my chest.

Then he gets up and slams his fist through the wall, so there's that.

"What are you doing?" I shriek.

"He _knew_," Damon says, punctuating his words by putting another hole in the concrete. "He left me here to watch you _love_ him, to watch you _mourn_ him, so that there would be _no __way_ I could ever be with you." He pauses, panting, blood streaking his arm to the elbow. "It's much worse than any torture I ever thought up for him. I must be losing my edge."

"Damon, what Stefan did," I begin, and he hits the wall again. I hear bones crunch in his hand and I flinch.

"I'm through talking about Stefan. I will watch over you, and I will protect you, Elena, and I will make damn sure that when you die you're a wrinkled old woman with grandchildren at your feet." He swallows, his shoulders shaking. "But don't ask me to _pretend __that __you __love __me_."

"No, we are going to talk about Stefan. You say you don't want to pretend? That's all Stefan's ever done with me."

"Stefan loves you," Damon says.

"So how come he's not here?" The words I haven't said - haven't _allowed_ myself to say - come bubbling out in a rush. "How come when he was free of Klaus' compulsion he chose to take off rather than try and make things right?"

"That's just the blood," Damon says dismissively, but he stops making new holes in the wall. For the moment, anyway. "He can't control himself when he's drinking human blood, you know that."

"You can."

"That's different."

"How? How is it different? Damon, you have less self-control than anyone I've ever known. But you're still here. You stay, even though I tell you over and over that we don't have a chance in hell. You could have taken off a hundred times, but you stay." _Because __you __love __me_, I don't say, but then I'm saying it anyway. "Because you love me. Why does Stefan gets a different set of rules?"

"He's my brother," Damon says. "He's the good one. You know it, Elena, everyone knows it. I'm the one who can't be trusted. I'm the one you should be afraid of."

"I am afraid of you," I say, getting to my feet. "You're not _safe_, Damon, and you're unstable, and you act without thinking all the time and yes, it's terrifying, knowing that at any moment you might snap. Do you get that, Damon? Being in love with you is terrifying."

"You're not in love with me," he shouts, and suddenly he's right in my face, his manic eyes locked with mine.

"I am in love with you, you _idiot_," I yell.

I think I hear the sound of his fist hitting the wall, except that he can't be hitting the wall, because his arms are around me and he's kissing me so hard I see stars.

But the crashing sound happens again, and Damon hears it too, because he pulls back and then pushes me behind him and Rebekah just stands in the doorway, the mangled bunker door lolling on its hinges.

"So sorry," she says, barely contained laughter in her voice. "Did I interrupt something?"

* * *

><p>"I won't do it," I tell her. "I won't open the scrolls. You don't know how to do the ritual and I won't tell you."<p>

"I do wish you would be quiet," Rebekah says. She twists the stake in Damon's stomach and he bites back a scream.

"Okay! Okay, I'll be quiet."

From the front half of Alaric's SUV, three heads turn toward me with identical expressions of dismay. Caroline reaches over from the back seat and grabs my hand, or tries to; it's hard for her to get a grip on me through the ropes, so she just sort of pats me in a conciliatory manner.

"I don't see why you had to tie her up," Caroline says. She looks a little disheveled, but no one seems to be hurt, for which I'm incredibly grateful.

Confused, but grateful.

"I didn't have to," Rebekah replies. "But she was being annoying. She got blood all over my blouse."

"No, that was me," Damon rasps.

"Whatever. Is it absolutely necessary for you to stop at _every_ stoplight, Alaric?"

"Yes, in fact, it is, Rebekah."

I lock eyes with Damon, who is doing his best not to cry out every time Alaric's SUV goes over a bump. The stake juts out just below his ribs and his shirt glistens with blood. He moves his right hand slowly until his knuckles bump against my ankle. Touching me, just barely.

I told him I loved him. I said the words _I __love __you_ and now his knuckles against my anklebone feel like a kiss and I don't know what to think about anything.

"Where's Bonnie?" I ask.

"You have an extremely short memory," Rebekah says, and she twists the stake again.

"When we get out of here," Damon grits, "I am going to kill you a lot."

"Young vampires these days have no respect for their elders," she says. "And there is no touching. You're being punished, don't you remember?"

Damon withdraws his hand and yelps as Alaric hits a pothole.

"Sorry, Damon," I hear Alaric call from the front seat.

Jeremy's the only one who hasn't said anything; he's sitting in the passenger seat scowling at something on the screen of his phone, but he seems fine, too.

In fact, the only person who's actually incapacitated is Damon, and I'm pretty sure that's just because he wouldn't stop coming at Rebekah even after she'd hurled him across the bunker a few dozen times.

My brain keeps playing the last few minutes in the bunker on a constant loop. _Being __in __love __with __you __is __terrifying. __You__'__re __not __in __love __with __me. __I __am, __you __idiot._

Rebekah is reclining across the back of the SUV, her long legs propped up on the window. She's playing idly with her mother's necklace, looking every inch the sweet teenage girl.

Even though I'm hogtied in the back of a car, I'm not particularly afraid of her at the moment. She could have hurt them, all of them, but she didn't. Why didn't she? It's almost like she's being _nice_, if that's a word I can use about someone who has skewered my boyfriend in the _oh __my __god __I __just __thought __of __Damon __as __my __boyfriend_.

I screw my eyes shut and try not to think about anything except the rumble of the engine.

Unfortunately, Rebekah has other ideas. "You two seemed to be getting on rather well when I burst in on you," she says conversationally. "I suppose now that Stefan's gone..."

"Don't talk about Stefan," I snap, before remembering that I'm supposed to be quiet. Rebekah just laughs. Damon, on the other hand, winces like she's twisted the stake again. It's just for a moment, and when I look at him again he's staring placidly out the window.

"I wouldn't feel too badly about it if I were you," Rebekah goes on. "After all, isn't it every girl's dream to have two men competing for her affections? I just wonder, Elena." She leans close, her glittering lips close to my ear. "What is it they dream of?"

I glare at her. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Damon's eyes, crazy blue and furious.

"I know Stefan's dreams," she says softly. "He dreams of blood, of tearing and rending and consuming. He dreams of _letting __go_."

I turn my face away from her. "How would you know?" I mutter.

"I may not be a witch," Rebekah whispers, "but there is more of my mother in me than one might think."

Rebekah sits up as we pull into the parking lot at the high school. I register her movement, and just as I begin to struggle against the ropes tying my hands and feet she smiles at me, reaches over, and breaks Damon's neck.


	14. Chapter 14

"Don't be so melodramatic," she tells me. "He'll be fine. It's hardly a grievous injury for our kind."

I glare at her. She's cut the ropes around my ankles but my hands are still tied behind my back so I can't even wipe the tears off my face.

She marches me down the hall toward what used to be the gym, her hand like steel on my shoulder. "I'm not your enemy, you know," she says.

"The hell you aren't."

"In fact," she says, as though I haven't spoken, "it may be that you and I are more alike than you prefer to think. We are both women born into a legacy that doesn't suit us, forced by outside elements to fulfill a particular destiny."

"You broke Damon's _neck_, Rebekah. I heard it snap." If I never hear that sound again as long as I live, it will be too soon. "You want me dead. Forgive me if I'm not feeling the girl talk vibe at the moment."

Rebekah laughs. "You understand nothing," she says, repeating what she said in the note she passed me in English class.

I frown, remembering how eagerly Rebekah had latched on to Mrs. Travers' reading of The Merchant of Venice that morning. I'd assumed she was identifying with Portia's predicament as a way to tell me that she still had her sights on Stefan.

What if she had meant it literally? Her father had taken away any choice she might have had to lead her own life. He had doomed her to an eternity of blood and death.

Before I'd stabbed her in the back, Rebekah had shown me a glimpse of the girl she might have been. A girl who wanted desperately to be _ordinary_. To be a cheerleader and wear cute clothes. To go to a dance and flirt with boys. To be loved by someone like Stefan, someone who could see her for who she was and still think she hung the moon.

I knew what it felt like to be loved that way by Stefan. From the moment I'd set eyes on him it had felt effortless, like fate.

But it hadn't been effortless, had it? He'd been watching me for a year, weighing his options, biding his time. His pursuit of me was a decision, and once we were together he'd been single-minded and methodical in his devotion.

I sneak a glance at Rebekah's profile. _We __are __a __predatory __species_, she told me once, angry that I'd made the mistake of thinking I knew Stefan better than she did. What if she was right?

I told Damon that Stefan had been pretending. When he'd loved Rebekah, he hadn't been pretending. He hadn't been _trying_. He hadn't been suppressing his nature or forcing himself to be a better person or struggling against his darker urges. He'd just been Stefan, and he'd fallen in love with her.

"Elena!" Bonnie cries, running toward me.

I stop, despite Rebekah's grip on my shoulder. "What have you done?" I ask.

"Elena, I had no idea. When Tyler told me about the enchantment -"

"How could you not have known? Bonnie, you cast a spell that made people act on their impulses. How could you have possibly thought that would be okay?"

Her face flushes. "It wasn't supposed to be everyone," she says. "Elena, I swear, it was a mistake."

"A mistake," I say. My voice sounds cold, furious. "I guess my brother's broken heart was a mistake, too."

Bonnie hangs her head. "It's fair to blame me for that. I was trying to make him jealous," she says quietly.

"Who? Jeremy?"

"He kissed Anna," Bonnie says, raising her eyes to mine. Hers sparkle with tears. "I was so hurt, and then Matt started looking at me like he was starting to feel something. So I decided to give him a little...nudge."

"That wasn't a nudge, Bonnie. And it affected the whole town. It affected _me._"

"I know," she says, "and I am so sorry. When I used Rebekah's connection with the Original Witch to access the scrolls, I didn't realize how much power I'd absorbed."

Her mention of the scrolls brings me crashing back to reality. "You know she's going to kill me," I say.

"No, Elena, you've got it wrong."

"I'm not the one who has it wrong, Bonnie. I read the scrolls. In order to do the ritual -"

"Enough talk," Rebekah says, giving me a push. "It's time to get this over with."

"Please, Elena," Bonnie says. She's staring hard into my eyes. "I need you to open the scrolls. I would never do anything to hurt you, you know that, but the ritual must be done."

"I won't," I say. "You can't make me."

Rebekah sighs. "I can, actually." She snaps her fingers, and after a moment I hear footsteps in the hall.

I don't want to turn around and see Tyler frog-marching my brother toward me. But I do.

Jeremy's head is down but there's blood all over his face, and he's walking with a limp. _He__'__s__wearing__his__ring_, I think, but it doesn't stop me from screaming his name and trying to run toward him. Rebekah's vise grip holds me in place.

"I can't kill him," she says. "Not lastingly, anyway, but you know all about that, don't you, Elena?" She smiles at me. "Perhaps I should stab him in the back, just for the poetic justice of it all."

"Don't hurt him," I wail, which is stupid, because they've already hurt him.

The double doors at the end of the hall slam open and a streak of blonde speeds toward us.

"Tyler Lockwood, how _could_ you?" Caroline skids to a stop in front of him. Her face is livid with fury. "Jeremy is your friend. You're supposed to be on our side."

"I _told_ you to wait outside," Rebekah huffs. "Honestly, do none of you understand simple commands?"

"Caroline," Tyler says. "She's Klaus' _sister_. I have to do what she says."

"I'm your girlfriend," Caroline shouts. "These are your friends. Who are you going to choose, Tyler?"

"This doesn't concern you, _little __girl_," Rebekah spits.

"Oh yeah? Say that to my face," Caroline says. Her eyes go dark and veiny and she bares her fangs.

"This is deeply annoying. Hold her," Rebekah says, shoving me at Tyler.

I stumble forward. Tyler lets go of Jeremy to catch me. "Get your hands off me," I hiss at him.

I'm surprised when he actually lets me go, but I can't think of anything except getting to my brother.

"Elena," Jeremy says. His voice is thick.

"Jeremy, I will get you out of this," I say. My tears have started again and I bury my face in his tee shirt. "I swear, I will." I look up at him, and I'm startled to see that the blood on his face doesn't seem to be coming from cuts or breaks in his skin. In fact, it looks almost...fake.

Jeremy gives me a wink, and then a look of shock spreads over his face. "Behind you," he whispers.

I whirl around. "Jeremy, what?"

He grabs my tied hands with his, and then I see her. Katherine Pierce, standing in the middle of the hall. She's wearing a strange, long dress, her hair back in a single braid. She's gesturing urgently at us - at _me_ - and pointing with her other arm at the place that used to be the gymnasium.

Where the sleeves of her dress ride up I can see her wrists. They're mangled by long, open wounds, gaping bloodlessly, exposing tendons and bone. As though she's been bled dry.

Not Katherine Pierce.

The first Petrova. The nameless girl whose blood cemented the curse of the Original Family, whose blood runs through Katherine's veins and mine. "That's the girl I saw before the gym exploded," Jeremy whispers, leaning close so only I can hear him. "I thought it was you."

"What is it?" Bonnie asks. She's at our side at once, and Jeremy lets go of my hands.

But his fingers haven't been still. He untied the ropes. My hands are free.

I keep them behind me, too aware of Rebekah and Caroline fighting in the hall. Rebekah may be ancient and practically all-powerful, but Caroline is like a force of nature; I'm surprised to see that she's holding her own. I hear the sound of a vervain grenade and know that Alaric has joined the fray.

I try not to wonder where Damon is. _If_ Damon is.

"Come on," Bonnie says. "There's not much time."

"Go," Jeremy says, and I glance back at him before letting Bonnie grab my arm and propel me through the gym doors.

* * *

><p>We step inside the Original Witch's home, and I immediately put Bonnie in a headlock.<p>

"Ow! Elena! What are you doing?"

"Tell me what she offered you," I say. "Is it power? Because, Bonnie, I promise you, whatever she says is a lie."

"Elena, seriously, you don't understand. This isn't what you think."

She wriggles in my arms and I tighten my grip, remembering the way Matt held Jeremy to keep him from fighting. "We had Katherine translate the scrolls, Bonnie. I know about the ritual, about needing my death to close the door between us and the other side."

"Elena," Bonnie gurgles. "You're choking me."

I let her go, because I don't actually want to strangle her. Much.

Bonnie coughs and I drop to the dusty ground, burying my head in my hands. "This is all so messed up," I say. My voice is muffled. "My best friend is going to kill me because of some stupid vampire, and I made out with Damon, and everything is just going to hell."

"You made out with _Damon_?"

I glare up at her. "That's hardly the most important part of all of that, but yes."

"It is the most important part of this. It tells me you're not thinking straight, and that that is a big deal, Elena. Maybe my spell did more than just make you act impulsively. Maybe it affected your judgment."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"No, it isn't. My spell wasn't supposed to make people do anything they wouldn't ordinarily do. It was the magical equivalent of a pre-dinner cocktail. Just enough to make people act on their impulses rather than over-thinking them."

"You basically roofied the whole town."

"I told you, I didn't roofie anyone. It was just supposed to be a nudge. And it was just supposed to be Matt."

"Bonnie, how is that better? Matt's our friend. You can't just go around manipulating people because you're feeling bad about a breakup."

"I can't believe you're judging me on this, Elena." She shoots me a look. "Isn't that exactly what you've been doing with Damon?"

My mouth falls open. "That is so not what I've been doing." But even I can hear the doubt in my voice. I'd been so willing to write off my actions over the last few days as being part of the enchantment, like that gave me the right to behave however I wanted.

Is that really different from what Bonnie was doing with Matt?

In my head, I hear my own voice shouting _I __am __in __love __with __you_ and suddenly I can see it from Damon's perspective: a girl who has sworn she doesn't have feelings for him, an enchantment, and sudden declarations of love.

No wonder he doesn't know what to think of me. I barely know what to think of me. _How __much __of __this __is __the __enchantment, __and __how __much __is __how __I __really __feel?_

"Stefan left you, and you're hurting," Bonnie says gently. "I get that, Elena, I do, but hooking up with Damon isn't going to make things better. He doesn't love you. He thinks he does, but magic can mess with people's heads. If you weren't the doppelganger, you'd see what a monster he is." She shakes her head at me. "It's a mistake."

"You should have thought of that before you cast your stupid spell," I say, and it's not what I mean at all but it makes her flush and look guilty, which I guess is what I wanted.

"He's crazy. You know that, right?" I just glare at her, and she shakes her head again. "And you think he has feelings for you? Real, non-doppelgangerish feelings?"

"How am I supposed to answer that, Bonnie? Besides, didn't you get into his head the other night? Didn't you make him relive the memory of kissing Katherine on my porch, thinking it was me?"

"That just proves he has feelings for the doppelganger," she says.

"Which is what I am," I say. I don't know why she keeps bringing it up. "In case you've forgotten."

She looks at me, her luminous eyes unreadable. "Do you trust me?" she says.

I don't know what to say to her. Three days ago, my answer would have been yes.

Her expression softens. "Open the scrolls, Elena. Please."

"Fine," I say. I stalk over to the table, unroll each of the scrolls one by one. "This is me, trusting you. Because trust is what friends -"

I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye and I turn just fast enough to see Bonnie lifting one of the rough wooden chairs and bringing it down over my head.


	15. Chapter 15

I wake up when Bonnie starts the chant.

"Bonnie!" I scream, ignoring the throbbing pain in my head and jumping to my feet. I try to run toward her but it's like I hit a glass wall.

"Don't bother," Rebekah says.

I whirl around, which is a mistake, because it feels like my brain is sloshing around in my skull. I hold very still for a moment, struggling not to throw up. The blonde vampire watches me from the floor, looking as annoyed as a wasp.

"I'd prefer it if you didn't vomit on my shoes," she says. "They were rather astonishingly expensive."

"What's going on?" I ask. "Why did Bonnie hit me over the head with a chair?"

"Your little witch friend decided to take matters into her own hands," Rebekah says. "I maintain that I was doing fine on my own, but witches always believe they know best."

"So you're going to kill me," I say flatly.

"I'll admit, the prospect has crossed my mind," Rebekah says, smiling widely. "But your death does not suit my purposes."

"What _are_ your purposes?" I ask, frowning through the pain in my head. "What is it that you and Bonnie have been planning? Because I get why you would want me dead, but unlike you, Bonnie is not a crazy psychotic bitch who kills people. Usually," I amend, thinking of the time she set Damon on fire. Or the other time she set Damon on fire.

Rebekah sighs and reaches into her jacket. She pulls out a knife.

"Bonnie," I scream again, scrabbling backward.

"Please," Rebekah says, grimacing. "Your incessant shrieking is setting my teeth on edge." She turns the knife so the handle faces me.

Not a knife. A dagger.

"Take it," she says. "I haven't the white oak ash, but there is more at the Salvatore mansion should you require it."

I take the dagger, still warm from being inside Rebekah's jacket.

Rebekah glares at me. "Now may we have a civilized conversation?"

"No," I say, but I wait for her to go on.

"As I was saying before, you and I have a common goal. I no longer want to be a slave to my family's curse. And you do not wish to be the doppelganger."

I furrow my brow. "I can't just not be the doppelganger, Rebekah. It's kind of out of my control."

"What if it wasn't?" she asks, her eyes sparkling. "What if you could simply be a girl? One of millions. Nothing special to anyone."

Nothing special to Klaus, she means. "But that's impossible," I say, my shaking voice betraying me, as usual.

"When you told me my brother Nick had killed our mother, I knew there was a reason," Rebekah says. "I knew there had been something he wanted to hide. Your witch friend helped me to discover what that thing had been."

"Bonnie used you to call on the Original Witch again," I said, and suddenly things start to fall into place. Bonnie's giddy energy. Rebekah collapsing when the gym exploded.

"When my mother knew she was going to die," Rebekah says, "she begged Ayana for forgiveness. Ayana pitied her. She had watched my mother's children grow, and she had become fond of us."

"Rebekah, I know what the scroll says. Ayana cursed your family. The only way to end the curse is for me to die."

"No, you know some of what the scroll says. You know how to temporarily sever the part of the curse that binds my mother to this plane. But there is still my brother to contend with. There is still another doppelganger in five hundred years' time."

My head is spinning, but I'm pretty sure it's not because of my possible concussion. "There's a loophole, isn't there?"

Rebekah nods, unclasping her mother's necklace and holding it in her hand. "The seventh scroll is marked with the blood of the first Petrova, the witch Ayana and my mother. The way to truly release my family from the doppelganger curse is if a Petrova doppelganger, an Original vampire, and a descendant of Ayana shed that blood again."

I sink to the ground, not trusting my legs to hold me up. "A blood truce," I say. "Between me and you and Bonnie."

"Ending the curse of the doppelganger. It will make your blood no different from any other blood, ending my brother's dreams of a hybrid army," Rebekah tells me. "And that is what the witches want. Ultimately, their desire to punish my mother for her transgression is less than their desire to restore balance to nature."

"Which is what Bonnie wants," I say.

"No," Rebekah says. "But it is what I want. I have had enough of running. For a vampire, five hundred years is but the blink of an eye. This way, both my mother and I can have peace."

"What do you mean, that's not what Bonnie wants? Of course it's what she wants," I say, but I remember the sad look in her eyes, the way she _hit __me __in __the __head __with __a __chair_. What do I know about what Bonnie wants, really?

"Your friend has her own agenda," she says. "She believes that if you are freed from the doppelganger curse, the Salvatore brothers will forget about you."

I'm not sure what I expected, but this is not it. "That's why Bonnie is doing this? To mess with my love life?"

"She's your friend," Rebekah says mildly. "To her, the greatest threat is your relationship with Stefan - and now, your relationship with Damon. In her mind, if the Salvatore brothers were out of the picture, you would no longer be in any danger." She sighs. "And as I said, witches always believe they know best."

"I don't - Damon doesn't - " My head aches, a stabbing pain just at the base of my neck. "He's in love with me."

"But as long as you are the doppelganger, you will wonder if his love is true. You will wonder how much of it is inspired by magic."

_I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. _

For the first time, I know what it means. The sacrifice that killed the first Petrova still decides my fate. As long as I am subject to the curse, I will never be sure that any choice I make is my own, or that anyone who cares for me actually cares for _me_.

Damon's voice comes to my mind, unbidden. _I __will __always __choose __you_, he says, and I shiver.

Watching Rebekah's face, I take the dagger and draw it across the palm of my hand. "I swear a truce with the Original Family and the descendants of Ayana," I say.

Bonnie's voice rises to a scream.

I look up to see Damon holding her off the ground, his fangs bared and pressed against her throat.

* * *

><p>"Damon, no!" I shriek.<p>

His eyes meet mine, bloodshot, furious.

Behind me, Rebekah stands and grabs the dagger from my hand. She slices into the skin of her own palm. "I swear," she says. "I swear a truce with the Petrova doppelganger and the descendants of Ayana. Bonnie, let us free."

Bonnie, weeping, stops the chant. I stumble forward suddenly, no longer constrained by the circle she drew in chalk on the hall floor.

"The witch must swear," Rebekah says.

"Damon," I say. "Let her go."

"She betrayed you, Elena." His eyes are wild, but his fangs recede. "She nearly got you killed."

"You have to let her go. Damon, please."

Instead of letting Bonnie go, Damon tightens his grip on her shoulders. "You told me you loved me. How much of it was her spell, Elena? If I snap her neck," he says, petting the ends of Bonnie's hair almost absently, "how long will it take you to realize that none of it was real?"

"Elena," Bonnie says urgently, breathlessly. "When the ritual is complete, he won't feel this way about you. It's the Petrova doppelganger he's obsessed with, not you. I did this so you can end it."

"What?" Damon says, startled. He almost drops her. "What are you talking about?"

I lock eyes with him. "You said you wanted it to be real, Damon."

"Elena. You're trusting her? After all this?"

"I am. I'm trusting them both," I say. "If it is real, there's nothing to be afraid of."

He releases Bonnie. She stumbles away from him. "The way I feel about you," he says, his voice raw, "has nothing to do with magic."

"I swear a truce," Bonnie says shakily, stabbing at her hand with the dagger, "with the Petrova doppelganger and the Original Family."

"The way I feel about you doesn't either," I tell him, and I clasp hands with Rebekah and Bonnie, the necklace pressing into our bloody palms.


	16. Chapter 16

The sound the gym makes when it turns into the gym again is even louder when you're standing right next to it.

I lose my grip on Rebekah and Bonnie when I fall to the ground. My palms hit the hall floor, but the jolt of pain I expect from the open wound doesn't come. I look at my hand. The cut is nothing more than a thin white line, like an old scar.

"The locket," Bonnie breathes.

It's gone. My hand flutters to my neck, remembering the weight of it, the feel of it against my collarbone.

Rebekah dusts off her clothes. Bloodstained and tattered, she still looks somewhat offensively beautiful. "At last," she says. Her voice only shakes a little. "I can finally leave this horrible little town."

Bonnie reaches for me, and I put my arms around her. "I'm sorry I thought you were trying to kill me," I say into her hair.

"I'm sorry I made you think you were in love with Damon," she says.

"Oh my god. Damon." I pull back from her, but the hall is empty except for the three of us.

"He left," Rebekah supplies helpfully. "I suppose it's possible the witch was right."

"Of course I was right," Bonnie says, but she frowns a little, like something has just occurred to her.

I should be happy about this. I should be relieved. Why do I feel like bursting into tears?

"This makes us even," Rebekah says to me. "I will be sure my brother doesn't bother you again."

I don't ask her what she means by that. Rebekah's ruthlessness would be easy to mistake for complacence, if you didn't know where to look.

She starts down the hall, then looks over her shoulder. "Incidentally, Elena, Shakespeare had it wrong," she says. "Portia was never more a slave to her father than when she refused love based on a deception."

And then she's gone, and I'm left thinking how much more clever comebacks sound with an English accent, and also wishing I'd finished The Merchant of Venice.

"Come on," Bonnie says. "I'll get you home."

Jeremy and Alaric run toward us as we approach the doors. "We heard the explosion," Alaric gasps. "Are you -?"

"We're fine," I say. I let go of Bonnie's hand and grab my brother in a hug. "You were a rock star, Jer."

"You weren't so bad yourself," Jeremy says, giving me a crooked smile.

"How did you know? With the," I gesture at his face, where he's done a terrible job of wiping off the fake blood.

"Tyler," he says. "He texted me in the car. Told me I'd need to flex my acting muscles because Rebekah had asked him to, quote unquote, show Elena that she's serious."

"Wow," I say. There are always loopholes.

"Yeah, well, he also told Rebekah where to find us. So don't go giving the guy a medal."

I let him go and look at Alaric. He's sweaty and disheveled, and I can see the residual fear in his eyes. Fear for me. Fear he doesn't need to feel, not anymore. "You don't have to be here," I tell him.

His face goes carefully blank. "Elena, if you don't want me around, all you have to do is say the word."

"Ric," I say, exhaling in frustration. "I mean, I'm not the doppelganger anymore. You don't have to protect me."

He gives me an unreadable look. "You're Isobel's daughter. You're Jenna's." He swallows hard. "I don't give a crap whether or not you're the doppelganger. You're Elena. And I'm - I'm not going anywhere."

"Good," I say, and I'm mildly horrified to find that I'm crying. I really hope he doesn't notice that I wipe my face on the shoulder of his jacket when I wrap my arms around him. He smells like bourbon and flannel and vervain. He smells like home. I hold on to him for a long time.

"Okay, let's get out of - oh." I turn to Bonnie, but she and Jeremy are apparently working through some issues of their own. Issues which seem to involve their tongues in each other's mouths. I spin around quickly, trying to un-see that particular scene.

Ric laughs. "I'll bring you home," he says.

As we reach the door, I hear Bonnie's voice from behind me. "Elena. I ended the impulse spell."

"Good," I say.

"No," she says. "I mean I ended it before. When Tyler told me what was happening. It's been hours since the enchantment stopped."

Hours. Was that before the bunker, or after? I close my eyes for just a moment, but everything in my head is a question mark and I can't separate one emotion from another. I turn to give Bonnie a wan smile and follow Alaric out to the SUV.

* * *

><p><em>I never thought of myself as impulsive. Acting on impulse seemed dangerous to me, irresponsible. Damon has always acted on impulse and it made me feel like I was walking a tightrope, never knowing when he'd stamp his foot and send shockwaves to knock me down. <em>

Maybe it needs to pass through my system, like the flu. I'll sleep it off, and when I wake up in the morning I won't keep looking up every time I hear a noise, thinking he's lurking in the corner or half-hiding in the shadows.

I wake up freezing, the window wide open. Just like I left it.

_Now I wonder if the thing I was afraid of was the truth of it. You can't lie when you're doing and not thinking. Lies require premeditation. Truth is imperfect and unplanned and messy, but it's real._

Maybe I just need to think about something else. I'm pretty sure my closet could use reorganizing. I could line up all my shoes by heel height. No, that's stupid. Maybe by color.

I keep my phone face-down on the dresser. When it's face-up, it's too tempting. I make rules for myself: I will only check my messages once every hour. Every half hour. Every fifteen minutes.

At some point I won't want to call him anymore, right?

_Damon said once that everything he tells me is the truth. Maybe that's the scariest thing of all._

He's well on his way to a good drunk when I finally stomp into his living room.

"We need to talk," I say.

"Just FYI. No good has ever followed those three words. Three? Four. Unless you don't count the to, which only has two letters anyway. Or we." He waves the bottle at me. "Drink?"

I grab the bottle out of his hands. The scotch burns as it goes down. "You haven't called me."

He takes the bottle back. "_You_ haven't called _me_."

"It's been three days."

He shrugs, almost falling down. This is especially impressive considering that he's already sitting on the floor. "Three days. Try a hundred and fifty years. _That_ is a long time to wait for someone to get in touch."

I cross my arms over my chest. "While your psychological scarring is almost certainly deeper and more impressive than mine, it doesn't change the fact that you owe me an explanation."

"I owe you?" He squints at me, his face annoyingly pretty by firelight. "Goes both ways, sweet cheeks."

"You did _not_ just call me 'sweet cheeks.'"

"Deal with it," he says, taking another long drink of scotch. "And yes."

"Never mind," I say. "This was obviously a huge mistake."

I spin on my heel, stalking out of the living room. I slam the front door on my way out. It makes a huge, satisfying noise that turns out to not satisfy me one bit, so I pull it open again and slam it harder.

I'm halfway to my car when I hear the door open again.

"That Damon guy," he says, falling into step beside me. "I don't know what you see in him. What's got you so upset?"

"The boy I'm in love with is being a non-communicative jerk. You?"

"Girl I'm in love with stomps a lot. What was it we needed to talk about, again?"

"I don't remember."

"Good," Damon says. He grabs me by my belt loops, drags me over to him, and kisses me.

Everything stops. I can't hear the crickets or the distant sound of traffic. I can't feel the cold winter air seeping into my jacket. His lips are the only things that exist, and the heat from his body, and his restless hands, sliding under my jacket and over my back. I clutch at his collar to keep from tilting and falling to the ground.

I don't know how much time passes but at some point the world stops its merry-go-round impression and he rests his forehead against mine. "No," he says, breathing hard, his fingers clenching and un-clenching against my waist. "I don't think there's still something between us. Must have been a doppelganger thing."

"You're right," I say, struggling to control the hectic thrumming of my heart. "I certainly don't feel anything now that the enchantment's ended." I look up at him through my eyelashes, enjoying the way his breath catches. "But maybe we should test it out one more time. You know, just to be sure."

He smiles against my lips. "When you put it that way," he says, and then he's doing something _extremely_ interesting with his mouth, and I decide that whatever we need to talk about can wait a little longer.


End file.
